Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology, University of Tübingen, 72072, Tübingen, Germany.
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 6AH, UK.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2023 Feb;23(1):30-41. doi: 10.3758/s13415-022-01046-4. Epub 2022 Nov 30.
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.
经济和决策理论假设，人们会从几乎没有成功概率的任务中脱离出来，因为这暗示着很少有规范的效用值。然而，人类往往会为一项极具挑战性的任务而被激励，即使没有任何外在激励。本研究旨在探讨这种基于挑战的动机的性质及其神经相关性。我们发现，当参与者在没有外在激励的情况下玩一项基于技能的任务时，他们的任务享受会随着成功机会的减少而增加，即使任务几乎不可能实现。然而，当参与者因任务而获得奖励或奖励以概率方式确定时，这种基于挑战的动机就不会被观察到。腹侧纹状体/苍白球的激活跟踪了任务享受的模式。这些结果表明，人们有内在的动力去挑战几乎不可能完成的任务，但前提是任务需要一定的技能，并且没有外在奖励。
