ArticleNeuropsychologia2019
Motivation dynamically increases noise resistance by internal feedback during movement.
Article in Neuropsychologia, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Reinforcement drives within- not between-trial motor adaptation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A neural language for the cerebellum: control of behavior via competing populations of Purkinje cells.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Review
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- Evidence for the Beneficial Effect of Reward on Working Memory: A Meta-Analytic Study.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- Continuous evaluation of cost-to-go for flexible reaching control and online decisions.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Moving, fast and slow: behavioural insights into bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2023Article
- Reward influences the allocation but not the availability of resources in visual working memory.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Modulation of Motor Vigor by Expectation of Reward Probability Trial-by-Trial Is Preserved in Healthy Ageing and Parkinson's Disease Patients.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Cognitive Control as a Multivariate Optimization Problem.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Rational inattention and tonic dopamine.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- The thermodynamics of cognition: A mathematical treatment.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2021Article
- Reward sensitivity and action in Parkinson's disease patients with and without apathy.Brain communications · 2021Article
- The thermodynamic brain and the evolution of intellect: the role of mental energy.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2020Review
- Article
- Selecting and Executing Actions for Rewards.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Reward-driven enhancements in motor control are robust to TMS manipulation.Experimental brain research · 2020Article
- Reward-Based Improvements in Motor Control Are Driven by Multiple Error-Reducing Mechanisms.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Motivation improves performance, pushing us beyond our normal limits. One general explanation for this is that the effects of neural noise can be reduced, at a cost. If this were possible, reward would promote investment in resisting noise. But how could the effects of noise be attenuated, and why should this be costly? Negative feedback may be employed to compensate for disturbances in a neural representation. Such feedback would increase the robustness of neural representations to internal signal fluctuations, producing a stable attractor. We propose that encoding this negative feedback in neural signals would incur additional costs proportional to the strength of the feedback signal. We use eye movements to test the hypothesis that motivation by reward improves precision by increasing the strength of internal negative feedback. We find that reward simultaneously increases the amplitude, velocity and endpoint precision of saccades, indicating true improvement in oculomotor performance. Analysis of trajectories demonstrates that variation in the eye position during the course of saccades is predictive of the variation of endpoints, but this relation is reduced by reward. This indicates that motivation permits more aggressive correction of errors during the saccade, so that they no longer affect the endpoint. We suggest that such increases in internal negative feedback allow attractor stability, albeit at a cost, and therefore may explain how motivation improves cognitive as well as motor precision.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.