The implications of advances in research on motivation for cognitive models

There has been an upsurge of research in psychology on the interface between motivation and cognition. Much of this work has focused on elucidating the structure of the motivational system, although this work has also begun to examine the influence of motivation on preference, choice and learning. The growing body of data provides an opportunity for computationally minded researchers to extend existing cognitive models to incorporate insights about the nature of the motivational system. This paper reviews some recent research and draws out the implications of this work for computational cognitive science.