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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 21, 2025

Virtual Hand with Ambiguous Movement between the Self and Other Origin: Sense of Ownership and 'Other-Produced' Agency
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Dissociating self-generated volition from externally-generated motivation.

Laurel S Morris1,2, Agnes Norbury2, Derek A Smith3

  • 1Department of Psychiatry, Depression and Anxiety Center for Discovery and Treatment, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, United States of America.

Plos One
|May 20, 2020
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Researchers developed a new task to measure self-generated motivation, finding people initiate less volitional effort when motivated internally versus externally. This reduced initiation was linked to anticipatory anhedonia symptoms.

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psychology
  • Behavioral Economics

Background:

  • Understanding motivation is crucial for neuropsychiatric conditions like anhedonia and apathy.
  • Existing models often focus on externally-driven effort for rewards, neglecting self-generated motivation (volition).
  • A gap exists in objectively measuring the distinct processes of self-generated versus externally-generated motivation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop and validate a novel task measuring separate components of self-generated and externally-generated motivation.
  • To investigate the relationship between these motivational measures and symptoms of anhedonia.
  • To differentiate effort initiation (bias) and effort acceleration (reward insensitivity) in self-generated versus externally-generated motivation.

Main Methods:

  • Developed a task with physical and cognitive effort variants to assess self-generated and externally-generated motivation.
  • Tested the task in two groups of healthy volunteers (N=27, N=28).
  • Modeled effort-reward relationships using sigmoid functions, analyzing parameters for bias and reward insensitivity.

Main Results:

  • A sigmoid function best fit the effort-reward data, characterized by bias and reward insensitivity parameters.
  • Higher bias was observed in self-generated conditions for both physical and cognitive effort, indicating reduced volitional initiation.
  • Increased bias in self-generated motivation correlated with anticipatory anhedonia; higher reward insensitivity occurred for physical self-generated effort.

Conclusions:

  • The study introduces a novel, objective measure for differentiating self-generated and externally-generated motivation.
  • Reduced self-generated effort initiation (higher bias) is a key feature, linked to anhedonia.
  • This measure offers potential insights into the neural mechanisms underlying anhedonia and related motivational deficits.