An Integration of Motivation and Cognition

Motivation and cognition are commonly modeled as distinct processes: motivation as some form of initiating and directing — pushing and pulling — behavior, and cognition as the manipulation of encoded representations in memory. This produces grave difficulties in understanding the interrelationships between them, and their interactions in behavior and development. I argue for a model of representation and motivation in which they emerge as different aspects of one underlying organization of interactive process. This natural integration yields an equally natural model of the joint development of higher order motivation and cognition, as interactions with learning and emotional processes are taken into account. Models of motivation and cognition often have little intrinsic relationship with each other. If, for example, cognition consists of manipulating encoded symbols (such as in the standard information processing paradigm) while motivation is concerned with energizing and directing an action system (such as in the Freudian paradigm), the interface between them is likely to be relatively ad hoc. Furthermore, such a fragmented model of mental phenomena is almost certainly false: motivation and cognition have evolved together and develop together and, consequently, must be more strongly integrated in order for their co-evolution and co-development to remain coordinated. If so, such models necessarily misrepresent the nature and interrelationships of motivation and cognition, and provide flawed guidance for developmental and educational policies and interventions. I will argue, in fact, that such models of cognition and motivation are false in themselves, independent of any issues regarding their interrelationships. The encoding paradigm, for example, including both its symbolic and its connectionist incarnations, faces myriads of fatal problems, including the fundamental fact that it cannot account for representational content, and, thus, cannot account for representation at all. The energizing conception of motivation, in turn, is incompatible with the basic fact that motivated action only occurs in systems that are, of ontological necessity, open and in ongoing interaction with their environment. Inertness that must be 'energized' is not an option. Nevertheless, I will argue, such fragmented models of mind are not only common, but are forced by dominant theoretical approaches and their presuppositions. I outline an alternative model in which motivation and cognition are tightly — ontologically, not merely ontogenetically — integrated and illustrate some of its consequences. The alternative model, however, requires changes in theoretical presuppositions, not just their contents. The presuppositions of a theoretical approach — even to the level of metaphysical presuppositions …