Remembering pleasure and personal meaning from episodes of intrinsic motivation: an fMRI study
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Remembering pleasure and personal meaning from episodes of intrinsic motivation: an fMRI study Woogul Lee1 · Johnmarshall Reeve2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract To decide whether or not to participate in an upcoming activity, people can use their memories of intrinsically-motivating or non-intrinsically-motivating experiences during previous participations. To understand the underlying neural mechanism of intrinsic motivation memories, we used a block-design functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to compare the neural activations during intrinsically-motivating memories versus during non-intrinsically-motivating memories. Results showed that both the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were more activated during the recall of intrinsically-motivating memories rather than during the recall of non-intrinsically-motivating memories. Greater negative functional interactions between the VMPFC and ACC were also observed in the intrinsicallymotivating situations. These findings suggest that the two complementary neural processes are employed to reconstruct intrinsically-motivating experiences: pleasure (reward related to VMPFC activity) and personal meaning (self-endorsement related to ACC activity). Keywords Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) · Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) · Intrinsic motivation · Selfdetermination theory (SDT) · Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)
Introduction Intrinsic motivation arises out of experiences of psychological need satisfaction to represent the positive emotionality (i.e., interest and enjoyment) that experiences of autonomy, competence, and relatedness satisfaction generate (Ryan and Deci 2017). When people engage in activities that generate psychologically need-satisfying experiences, they experience intrinsic motivation and this experience of intrinsic motivation is associated with a wide range of indicators of positive functioning, including engagement, learning, creativity, performance, vitality, and well-being (Chen et al. 2015; Jang et al. 2012; Reis et al. 2000; Taylor * Woogul Lee [email protected] * Johnmarshall Reeve [email protected] 1
Department of Education, Korea National University of Education, Cheongju‑si, Chungbuk 28173, Korea
Institute of Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, 33 Berry St., 9th Floor, North Sydney, NSW 2059, Australia
2
and Lonsdale 2010; Vansteenkiste et al. 2004). The benefits of intrinsic motivation during task engagement are well documented (Ryan and Deci 2017), but it is further worth noting that people remember whether the activity was intrinsically-motivating or not for them (Krapp 2005; Reeve et al. 2015). These memories are important because they affect the decision-making whether to seek out and reengage in that activity in the future (Deci et al. 1999). That is, when people have another opportunity to engage with the activity or not, intrinsic motivation m
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