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Updated: Jun 12, 2026

Studying Food Reward and Motivation in Humans
Published on: March 19, 2014
Splitting motivation: unilateral effects of subliminal incentives
Liane Schmidt1, Stefano Palminteri, Gilles Lafargue
1Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Paris, France.
Abstract:
Motivation is generally understood to denote the strength of a person's desire to attain a goal. Here we challenge this view of motivation as a person-level concept, in a study that targeted subliminal incentives to only one half of the human brain. Participants in the study squeezed a handgrip to win the greatest fraction possible of each subliminal incentive, which materialized as a coin image flashed in one visual hemifield. Motivation effects (i.e., more force exerted when the incentive was higher) were observed only for the hand controlled by the stimulated brain hemisphere. These results show that in the absence of conscious control, one brain hemisphere, and hence one side of the body, can be motivated independently of the other.
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