Effort discounting in human nucleus accumbens |
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Authors: | Matthew M Botvinick Stacy Huffstetler Joseph T McGuire |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Psychology, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, 3-C-10 Green Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA;(2) Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA |
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Abstract: | A great deal of behavioral and economic research suggests that the value attached to a reward stands in inverse relation to
the amount of effort required to obtain it, a principle known as effort discounting. In the present article, we present the
first direct evidence for a neural analogue of effort discounting. We used fMRI to measure neural responses to monetary rewards
in the human nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a structure previously demonstrated to encode reference-dependent reward information.
The magnitude of accumbens activation was found to vary with both reward outcome and the degree of mental effort demanded
to obtain individual rewards. For a fixed level of reward, the NAcc was less strongly activated following a high-demand for
effort than following a low demand. The magnitude of this effect was noted to correlate with preceding activation in the dorsal
anterior cingulate cortex, a region that has been proposed to monitor information-processing demands and to mediate in the
subjective experience of effort. |
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Keywords: | |
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