The aim of this essay is to give an overview of the topic of intrinsic motivation based on psychological and neuroimaging research. More specifically, the objective is to give an overview of the various benefits of intrinsic motivation, discuss its relationship to extrinsic rewards, and review the existing neuroimaging research that has explicitly explored intrinsic motivation. A positive relat...

BACKGROUND Among millions of people who suffer from schistosomiasis in China, adolescents are at increased risk to be infected. However, there is a lack of theory-guided behavioral prevention intervention programs to protect these adolescents. This study attempted to apply the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) in predicting intentions to engage in protective behaviors against schistosomiasis i...

Money's ability to enhance memory has received increased attention in recent research. However, previous studies have not directly addressed the time-dependent nature of monetary effects on memory, which are suggested to exist by research in cognitive neuroscience, and the possible detrimental effects of monetary rewards on learning interesting material, as indicated by studies in motivational ...

Reward is the simplest way to motivate students in education. It can encourage students to learn and get immediate achievement. Moreover, it is also has potential to construct students’ intrinsic motivation. However, traditional rewards are often less valuable thus can’t keep motivating students, e.g. symbolic rewards like stars or stickers can’t be used by the students after the class; therefo...

Sta expenditures in the U.S. Congress increased exponentially from 1940 to 1980, but have remained roughly constant since. A theoretical model of Congressional expenditures, bureaucratic oversight, and congressional ethics is developed to understand historical data. Such a model allows one to de ne and test a measure of the fraction of Congress that maximizes material rewards (vs. intrinsic rew...

The present study examined how rewards affect people's intrinsic motivation when the rewards are tied to meeting increasingly demanding performance standards. The experiment was a 2 x 2 factorial design with 2 levels of performance standard (constant, progressive) and 2 levels of reward (reward, no reward). Using a puzzle-solving task, 60 undergraduate university students were randomly assigned...

The long-standing debate over whether extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation and the more recent debate regarding the costs and benefits of performance goals are central issues addressed in Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: The Search for Optimal Motivation and Performance, edited by Carol Sansone and Judith Harackiewicz. The book contains chapters from a number of the most prominen...

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration strategies such as -greedy action selection or Gaussian control noise, but there are many tasks where these methods are insufficient to make any learning progress. ...