Identifying the neural substrates of intrinsic motivation during task performance.
Intrinsic motivation is the inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenge, to explore and investigate, and to stretch and extend one's capacities. When people imagine performing intrinsically motivating tasks, they show heightened anterior insular cortex (AIC) activity. To fully explain the neural system of intrinsic motivation, however, requires assessing neural activity while people actually perform intrinsically motivating tasks (i.e., while answering curiosity-inducing questions or solving competence-enabling anagrams). Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that the neural system of intrinsic motivation involves not only AIC activity, but also striatum activity and, further, AIC-striatum functional interactions. These findings suggest that subjective feelings of intrinsic satisfaction (associated with AIC activations), reward processing (associated with striatum activations), and their interactions underlie the actual experience of intrinsic motivation. These neural findings are consistent with the conceptualization of intrinsic motivation as the pursuit and satisfaction of subjective feelings (interest and enjoyment) as intrinsic rewards.
['Lee|Woogul|W|', 'Reeve|Johnmarshall|J|']
D000328:Adult D001931:Brain Mapping D002540:Cerebral Cortex D003342:Corpus Striatum D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging D008297:Male D009042:Motivation D010549:Personal Satisfaction D012201:Reward D013647:Task Performance and Analysis D055815:Young Adult
Intrinsic motivation Anterior insular cortex (AIC) Striatum Functional connectivity Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)