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Dissociating self-generated volition from externally-generated motivation.

ABSTRACT: Insight into motivational processes may be gained by examining measures of willingness to exert effort for rewards, which have been linked to neuropsychiatric symptoms of anhedonia and apathy. However, while much work has focused on the development of models of motivation based on classic tasks of externally-generated levels of effort for reward, there has been less focus on the question of self-generated motivation or volition. We developed a task that aims to capture separate measures of self-generated and externally-generated motivation, with two task variants for physical and cognitive effort, and sought to test and validate this measure in two populations of healthy volunteers (N = 27 and N = 28). Similar to previous reports, a sigmoid function represented a better overall fit to the effort-reward data than a linear or Weibull model. Individual sigmoid function shapes were governed by two free parameters: bias (the amount of reward needed for effort initiation) and reward insensitivity (the amount of increase in reward needed to accelerate effort expenditure). For both physical and cognitive effort, bias was higher in the self-generated condition, indicating reduced self-generated volitional effort initiation, compared to externally-generated effort initiation, across effort domains. Bias against initial effort initiation in the self-generated condition was related to a specific dimensional measure of anticipatory anhedonia. For physical effort only, reward insensitivity was also higher in the self-generated condition compared to the externally-generated motivation condition, indicating lower self-generated effort acceleration. This work provides a novel objective measure of self-generated motivation that may provide insights into mechanisms of anhedonia and related symptoms.

SUBMITTER: Morris LS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7236980 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Bodily illusions have been used to study bodily self-consciousness and disentangle its various components, among other the sense of ownership and self-location. Congruent multimodal correlations between the real body and a fake humanoid body can in fact trigger the illusion that the fake body is one's own and/or disrupt the unity between the perceived self-location and the position of the physical body. However, the extent to which changes in self-location entail changes in ownership is still matter of debate. Here we address this problem with the support of immersive virtual reality. Congruent visuotactile stimulation was delivered on healthy participants to trigger full body illusions from different visual perspectives, each resulting in a different degree of overlap between real and virtual body. Changes in ownership and self-location were measured with novel self-posture assessment tasks and with an adapted version of the cross-modal congruency task. We found that, despite their strong coupling, self-location and ownership can be selectively altered: self-location was affected when having a third person perspective over the virtual body, while ownership toward the virtual body was experienced only in the conditions with total or partial overlap. Thus, when the virtual body is seen in the far extra-personal space, changes in self-location were not coupled with changes in ownership. If a partial spatial overlap is present, ownership was instead typically experienced with a boosted change in the perceived self-location. We discussed results in the context of the current knowledge of the multisensory integration mechanisms contributing to self-body perception. We argue that changes in the perceived self-location are associated to the dynamical representation of peripersonal space encoded by visuotactile neurons. On the other hand, our results speak in favor of visuo-proprioceptive neuronal populations being a driving trigger in full body ownership illusions.

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Dissociating self-generated volition from externally-generated motivation.

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