Effort-motivated behavior resolves paradoxes in appetitive conditioning

Motivated behavior has long been studied by psychologists, ethologists, and neuroscientists. To date, many scientists agree with the view that cue and reward attraction is the product of a dopamine-dependent uncon-scious process called incentive salience or wanting. This process allows the influence of multiple factors such as hunger and odors on motivational attraction. In some cases, however, the resulting motivated behavior differs from what the incentive salience hypothesis would predict. I argue that seeking behavior under reward uncer-tainty illustrates this situation: Organisms do not just want (appetite-based attraction) cues that are incon-sistent or associated with reward occasionally, they hope that those cues will consistently predict reward procurement in the ongoing trial. Said otherwise, they become motivated to invest time and energy to find consistent cue-reward associations despite no guarantee of success (effort-based attraction). A multi-test com-parison of performance between individuals trained under uncertainty and certainty reveals behavioral para-doxes suggesting that the concept of incentive salience cannot fully account for responding to inconsistent cues. A mathematical model explains how appetite-based and effort-based attractions might combine their effects.

Automated summary

Motivated behavior is believed to be a dopamine-dependent unconscious process, but seeking behavior under reward uncertainty shows behavioral paradoxes that deviate from the predictions of the incentive salience hypothesis, indicating a combination of appetite-based and effort-based attractions.