BACKGROUND Individuals with anorexia nervosa are thought to exert excessive self-control to inhibit primary drives. METHODS This study used functional MRI (fMRI) to interrogate interactions between the neural correlates of cognitive control and motivational processes in the brain reward system during the anticipation of monetary reward and reward-related feedback. In order to avoid confoundin...

Food rewards elicit a variety of affective responses. They emerge from multiple components, including motivational and hedonic processes. Here, we review evidence for these components through an science lens. We describe recent advances showing that the are modulated by dopamine opioids in different ways, involve distinct subregions ventral striatum, decoupled addiction. Building on conceptual ...

Expressing one's preference via choice can be rewarding, particularly when decisions are voluntarily made as opposed to being forced. An open question is whether engaging in choices involving rewards recruits distinct neural systems as a function of sensitivity to reward. Reward sensitivity is a trait partly influenced by the mesolimbic dopamine system, which can impact an individual's neural a...

BACKGROUND Reinforcement of behavioral responses involves a complex cerebral circuit engaging specific neuronal networks that are modulated by cortical oversight systems affiliated with emotion, memory, judgment, and decision making (collectively referred to in this study as the "extended reward and oversight system" or "reward network"). We examined whether reward-network brain volumes are red...

It is commonly accepted that reward is an effective motivator of behavior, but little is known about potential costs resulting from reward associations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural underpinnings of such reward-related performance-disrupting effects in a reward-modulated Stroop task in humans. While reward associations in the task-relevant...

Recent advances in the cognitive neuroscience of motivation and learning have demonstrated a critical role for midbrain dopamine and its targets in reward prediction. Converging evidence suggests that midbrain dopamine neurons signal a reward prediction error, allowing an organism to predict, and to act to increase, the probability of reward in the future. This view has been highly successful i...

The hippocampus has the extraordinary capacity to process and store information. Consequently, there is an intense interest in the mechanisms that underline learning and memory. Synaptic plasticity has been hypothesized to be the neuronal substrate for learning. Ca(2+) and Ca(2+)-activated kinases control cellular processes of most forms of hippocampal synapse plasticity. In this paper, I aim t...

Continuous-time Markov decision processes (CTMDPs) are widely used for the control of queueing systems, epidemic and manufacturing processes. Various results on optimal schedulers for discounted and average reward optimality criteria in CTMDPs are known, but the typical game-theoretic winning objectives have received scant attention so far. This paper studies various sorts of reachability objec...

Despite its being historically conceptualized as a motor expression site, emerging evidence suggests the ventral pallidum (VP) plays a more active role in integrating information to generate motivation. Here, we investigated whether rat VP cue responses would encode and contribute similarly to the vigor of reward-seeking behaviors trained under Pavlovian versus instrumental contingencies, when ...

Adaptive behavior requires that animals integrate current and past information with their decision-making. One important type of information is auditory-communication signals (i.e., species-specific vocalizations). Here, we tested how rhesus monkeys incorporate the opportunity to listen to different species-specific vocalizations into their decision-making processes. In particular, we tested ho...