Abstract

Motivation is a central aspect of life. One aspect of motivation is the balance between immediate and future benefits, i.e. exploration-exploitation trade-off. It follows that motivation is closely linked to the benefits of extracting the statistical regularities from the environment aka learning about risk, ambiguity and volatility. Furthermore, one can think of intrinsic motivation as reducing ignorance and extrinsic motivation as maximizing expected utility. In this framework motivation would be the reduction of uncertainties, i.e. performing actions to increase one’s knowledge about the world bound by cost-benefit calculations. In the talk I will also present some of our tasks aimed to simultaneously measure one’s uncertainty and investment.

About the speaker

Gerit Pfuhl, Associate Professor

Principal Investigator at Gerit Pfuhl lab
Institute of Psychology, Tromsø University