Nucleus Accumbens Mediates Relative Motivation for Rewards in the Absence of Choice

To dissociate a choice from its antecedent neural states, motivation associated with the expected outcome must be captured in the absence of choice. Yet, the neural mechanisms that mediate behavioral idiosyncrasies in motivation, particularly with regard to complex economic preferences, are rarely examined in situations without overt decisions. We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging in a large sample of participants while they anticipated earning rewards from two different modalities: monetary and candy rewards. An index for relative motivation toward different reward types was constructed using reaction times to the target for earning rewards. Activation in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and anterior insula (aINS) predicted individual variation in relative motivation between our reward modalities. NAcc activation, however, mediated the effects of aINS, indicating the NAcc is the likely source of this relative weighting. These results demonstrate that neural idiosyncrasies in reward efficacy exist even in the absence of explicit choices, and extend the role of NAcc as a critical brain region for such choice-free motivation

Affective privilege: Asymmetric interference by emotional distracters

Numerous theories posit that affectively salient stimuli are privileged in their capacity to capture attention and disrupt ongoing cognition. Two underlying assumptions in this theoretical position are that the potency of affective stimuli transcends task boundaries (i.e., emotional distracters do not have to belong to a current task-set to disrupt processing) and that there is an asymmetry between emotional and cognitive processing (i.e., emotional distracters disrupt cognitive processing, but not vice versa). These assumptions have remained largely untested, as common experimental probes of emotion-cognition interaction rarely manipulate task-relevance and only examine one side of the presumed asymmetry of interference. To test these propositions directly, a face-word Stroop protocol was adapted to independently manipulate (a) the congruency between target and distracter stimulus features, (b) the affective salience of distracter features, and (c) the task-relevance of emotional compared to non-emotional target features. A three-way interaction revealed interdependent effects of distracter relevance, congruence, and affective salience. Compared to task-irrelevant distracters, task-relevant congruent distracters facilitated performance and task-relevant incongruent distracters impaired performance, but the latter effect depended on the nature of the target feature and task. Specifically, task-irrelevant emotional distracters resulted in equivalent performance costs as task-relevant non-emotional distracters, whereas task-irrelevant non-emotional distracters did not produce performance costs comparable to those generated by task-relevant emotional distracters. These results document asymmetric cross-task interference effects for affectively salient stimuli, supporting the notion of affective prioritization in human information processing