ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2023
Motivated for near impossibility: How task type and reward modulate task enjoyment and the striatal activation for extremely difficult task.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Effects of Augmented Feedback, Focus of Attention, and Monetary Reward on Vertical Jump Height: A Replication Study.International journal of exercise science · 2025Article
- Motivated with joy or anxiety: Does approach-avoidance goal framing elicit differential reward-network activation in the brain?Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- The bright and dark sides of egoism.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Economic and decision-making theories suppose that people would disengage from a task with near zero success probability, because this implicates little normative utility values. However, humans often are motivated for an extremely challenging task, even without any extrinsic incentives. The current study aimed to address the nature of this challenge-based motivation and its neural correlates. We found that, when participants played a skill-based task without extrinsic incentives, their task enjoyment increased as the chance of success decreased, even if the task was almost impossible to achieve. However, such challenge-based motivation was not observed when participants were rewarded for the task or the reward was determined in a probabilistic manner. The activation in the ventral striatum/pallidum tracked the pattern of task enjoyment. These results suggest that people are intrinsically motivated to challenge a nearly impossible task but only when the task requires certain skills and extrinsic rewards are unavailable.
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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.