From child play to scientific discovery, many activities human engage in are rewarding in and of themselves. What does make such activities intrinsically rewarding?
Based on the existing literature we propose the answer is an increased sense of self-efficacy. That is, an activity that is intrinsically rewarding is one that strengthens a person’s belief that they can execute actions required to successfully deal with prospective situations. We propose that this notion can explain the rewarding nature of many activities and situations from solving cross word puzzles to helping others, consuming arts and playing sports. We suggest that processes that lead to increased self-efficacy, such as executing agency and learning, activate the neural reward system. This in turn is experienced as pleasure and reinforces the activity that generated the response. Intrinsic rewards would lead biological organism to improve their knowledge and skills which could help them adapt to changing environments.
My current work aim at demonstrating this proposal, across species.
Well-being and decision-making: does learning matter more that reward?
Subjective well-being or happiness is often associated with wealth, and many people believe they would be happier if only they had more money. However, recent studies have shown that the happiness that people feel from moment to moment is determined to a large degree by recent reward prediction errors, the difference between experienced and predicted rewards. Reward prediction errors play a central role in learning and in updating beliefs about the world. Therefore, one possibility is that the association between happiness and reward prediction errors is actually explained by learning and not reward. However, in most experiments, learning and reward cannot be easily separated because the size of the reward received tells you how much to change your beliefs.
In a recent study, I showed that how we learn about our world can be more important for how we feel than the rewards we actually receive. Measuring happiness in different kinds of environments may be particularly useful for understanding mental health. My results suggest that uncertain environments may be especially unpleasant for depressed individuals. Understanding happiness in uncertain environments may be important because they more closely approximate the real world. Rewards may be infrequent in such environments, but there is still the potential for learning, growth, and happiness.
Cognitive fatigue
Cognitive fatigue has been studied for decades. It often refers to the evolution of accuracy with time while you perform cognitive tasks, like when you use working memory to recall a piece of information or when you switch between two tasks (e.g. , between facebook and the excel table you are working on). It also refers to the subjective feeling of fatigue while you perform such tasks.
However, many different patterns of accuracy evolution have been found: accuracy could increase, could remain stable, or could decrease with time, often displaying a mixture of those three patterns. This is probably due to the combined effect of training, motivation and fatigue. It is difficult to measure the relative contribution of each.
To go beyond these limitations, we have used a measure that is important in everyday life but that does not depend on training or motivation: economical choices like intertemporal choices (between an immediate monetary reward and a higher but delayed monetary reward, e.g., €10 now or €50 in 1 year). This kind of choices are used in economics to study consumption/saving trade off and in psychaitry to measure impulsivity. We have showed that performing hard cognitive tasks leads to an increase in choice impulsivity (i.e., the proportion of immediatie reward chosen), more than performing easy versions of the same tasks and more than playing video games or reading newspapers. This Increase in choice impulsivity was associated to a decrease in the activity of one particular brain area in the lateral prefrontal cortex.