Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• O’Reilly, Randall C.

Titel

Unraveling the Mysteries of Motivation

Ist Teil von

• Trends in cognitive sciences, 2020-06, Vol.24 (6), p.425-434

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Motivation plays a central role in human behavior and cognition but is not well captured by widely used artificial intelligence (AI) and computational modeling frameworks. This Opinion article addresses two central questions regarding the nature of motivation: what are the nature and dynamics of the internal goals that drive our motivational system and how can this system be sufficiently flexible to support our ability to rapidly adapt to novel situations, tasks, etc.? In reviewing existing systems and neuroscience research and theorizing on these questions, a wealth of insights to constrain the development of computational models of motivation can be found. Motivation can be operationalized in terms of goals, which are distributed and multifactorial, including biologically and affectively salient outcomes, sensory-motor plans, and integrated utility representations. Different frontostriatal loops are specialized for each of these factors, involving the OFC, dlPFC, and ACC, respectively.We appear to have different value functions when considering potential goals to pursue, compared with when we are engaged in pursuing an active goal: the goal-selection phase is relatively conservative because the goal-engaged state is so dominated by pursuit of the active goal. This can explain procrastination and other phenomena.The coordination and binding across these distributed goal representations during planning and decision making requires serial processing, which also has the benefit of enabling flexible reuse of processing systems across time, resulting in serial Turing-machine-like flexibility.