L9 - Motivation

Question 1

What is motivation?

Answer 1

State or condition that serves to engage the leaner, arouse behaviour and give it direction or persistence.

Can increase vigour (speed/amount) or can motivate you to learn through reward.

Question 2

Praise from a coach would be considered as intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?

Answer 2

Extrinsic

Question 3

What is intrinsic motivation?

Answer 3

• Internal drives that direct our behaviour .

- enjoyment of the behaviour & satisfaction of performing

Question 4

What is extrinsic motivation?

Answer 4

• feelings coming from externally derived reward
• tangible rewards such as prizes, trophies, awards, money etc, as well as intangible rewards such as praise and recognition from others.

Question 5

What is the argued relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic reward?

Answer 5

Arguments in the literature that providing excessive extrinsic reward can decrease the amount of intrinsic reward that can influence behaviour. I.e. why would participants feel motivated by high satisfaction/enjoyment alone, when they were being rewarded with monetary rewards previously?

Question 6

What is increased vigour?

Answer 6

Movements are performed with greater speed/force or more generally performed more.

Question 7

What is increased vigour related to (mechanism)?

Answer 7

Related to tonic dopamine - higher levels of resting dopamine make you more sensitive to reward and less sensitive to costs (such as effort and energy expenditure)

Not learning dependent - ON/OFF effect.

Question 8

What is reinforcement based learning?

Answer 8

Actions are selected with increased or decreased frequency based on reward or punishment.

Question 9

What is reinforcement based learning related to (mechanism)?

Answer 9

Related to phasic dopamine, when you get a burst of dopamine after reward. Rewarding movement that precedes it is more likely to be repeated as a result.

Unrewarded movements result in a dip in dopamine, making preceding movements less likely to be repeated.

Learning.

Question 10

What is tonic dopamine release?

Answer 10

Dopamine is released independently of neuron activity. Low level, constant activity and as such often referred to as resting levels of dopamine.

Question 11

What is phasic dopamine release?

Answer 11

Large amount of dopamine released in spikes as a result of neuron activity.

Question 12

What is the relationship between tonic and phasic dopamine release?

Answer 12

Larger or more frequent bursts of phasic dopamine will lead to higher levels of tonic/resting dopamine release.

(Mostly independent apart from this relationship)

Question 13

When PD patients have high levels of dopamine loss, and are therefore treated with levodopa, how is their tonic and/or phasic firing affected by the levodopa?

Answer 13

Levodopa medication will restore tonic dopamine firing, increasing resting levels, by increasing the amount of overall dopamine in the system. However, phasic firing will be unaffected.

Question 14

What is the speed-accuracy trade off?

Answer 14

The faster you go, the less accurate you will be.

Question 15

According to research, what does reward seem to do, at least in the context of saccadic eye movements?

Answer 15

Reward seems to break the speed-accuracy trade off, with greater speed, and lower reaction times leading also to higher levels of accuracy.

Question 16

In PD patients, what was the effect of reward on the speed and accuracy of saccadic movements?

Answer 16

No effect of reward. PD patients, off medication, don’t have normal levels of dopamine and therefore do not demonstrate sensitivity to reward.

Suggests that the effects of reward is dopamine dependent.

Question 17

Have the effects of reward shown with saccadic eye movements been replicated successfully in reaching movements?

Answer 17

Yes - Codol and Galea.

Movements were faster with reward, but accuracy was unchanged.
Generally able to replicate the effect that application of reward on a trial-by-trial basis.

Question 18

Is the vigour-related effect important for motor rehab?

Answer 18

Yes.

But there is no work looking at the effect of vigour for motor rehab, in terms of a more general behaviour level such as engagement.

Question 19

What are the alternative mechanisms that could explain the effect that reward has on increased vigour?

Answer 19

• reward improves attention, leading to increased performance
• reward leads to reduced sensitivity to effort. Willing to produce movements that are more effortful if reward is provided.

Question 20

What did a study find about the effects of levodopa on rehabilitation in stroke patients, independent of reward?

Answer 20

6 weeks of normal rehab in sub-acute phase. Levodopa vs placebo.

Levodopa - significantly greater improvements in behaviour vs placebo, independent of any reward effects. Unsure of underlying mechanisms. May just be increased willingness to engage and exert effort due to higher levels of dopamine in their system.

Question 21

What is the overall percentage of clinical trials that show an effect of levodopa on stroke rehabilitation? Why might this be the case?

Answer 21

50% of clinical trials show that levodopa has an effect, 50% don’t.

May be because reward is often not controlled for, and the specific extents of reward that rehabilitation methods induce is difficult to know and control for.

Question 22

Why might motivation be important in rehab?

Answer 22

• helps drive engagement of patients in therapy
• motivating exercises may allow patients to perform for longer and with more repetitions - allowing higher therapy dosage.
• increased motivation leads to greater effort and physical activation
• motivation, salience and attention are critical modulators of neuroplasticity
• active training, which results from higher motivation, is more effective than passive training and leads to better motor outcomes.

Question 23

Do stroke practitioners pay sufficient heed to the potential effects of increased motivation in stroke rehab?

Answer 23

Quattrocchi analysed 36 stroke professionals’ views.

Motor impairment, then cognitive impairment, personality and then motivation - rank of importance.

There is agreement among practitioners that motivation is a key determinant in stroke recovery. But was no agreement on the best method to assess patients’ motivation.

Question 24

What is one way to measure vigour/tonic dopamine?

Answer 24

Evaluating global levels of motivation using cognitive tests.

The validity of these in accessing tonic dopamine could be contested, but it is a possibility.

Question 25

What may be the main reason for the low utilisation of reward in rehab by stroke practitioners, as found in Quattrocchi’s analysis?

Answer 25

Stroke practitioners have no formal knowledge or training involving the use or effects of reward on rehab.

Question 26

Positive punishment/reinforcement involves?

Answer 26

The presence of a stimulus

Question 27

Negative reinforcement/punishment involves?

Answer 27

The removal of a stimulus

Question 28

What are the two types of negative reinforcement? What do they each mean?

Answer 28

Escape - removal of a toxic stimulus

Active avoidance - prevention of a toxic stimulus

Question 29

What did Therrien, Wolpert and Bastian (2015) find about reward vs error based learning? What do these findings suggest?

Answer 29

Controls learned similarly from reinforcement and error based feedback, and showed better retention for reinforcement learning.

Patients with cerebellar damage were not able to learn - adjust their angle of aiming - when error based (visual) feedback was supplied.

Suggests:

• reinforcement feedback can be used for people that are unsuccessful on error-based feedback (especially those that have cerebellar deficits).
• error based learning system has independent underlying mechanisms to reinforcement based learning systems.

Question 30

What and how did Holland, Codol and Galea (2018) find about the underlying mechanisms of reward-based learning?

Answer 30

Measured adjustments of aiming in response to a gradually changing reward region, up to 25 degrees. Then told participants to maintain what they were doing, while they removed visual feedback. And then told them to remove any strategies they were using to aim accurately.

However, all participants’ accuracy dropped to the same low level when told to remove the use of strategies, and aim directly towards the target - suggesting that reward-based learning does seem to be driven by explicit components.

Means that previous studies’ suggestions, such as those from Therrien, Wolpert & Bastian (2015) that the learning from reward-based feedback is permanent and is retained well, may not be true, and may have previously resulted from strategy use, which is less useful for stroke rehab.

Question 31

What was the follow up task conducted in Holland, Codol and Galea’s (2018) study into reward based learning and its explicit components?

Answer 31

Holland asked PPS to decide whether a shape presented after the reaching movement was the same or not to the shape presented on the previous trial.

Found that, when this secondary task was implemented, participants’ performance was completely disrupted.

Suggests that short term memory and ability to use explicit control is required for reward based learning.

Question 32

Based on Holland, Codol and Galea’s (2018) study, what should be used to increase motivation in stroke rehab and why?

Answer 32

The study showed that reward based learning is cognitively demanding and explicit in nature, which is not preferable for stroke rehab as the establishment of long term effects will be impossible as soon as cognitive work is not carried out (which could be straight after the learning task).

Authors’ lab therefore believe that vigour related effects should be used for stroke rehab instead of reward-based.

Question 33

What has been found regarding the differential effects of reward and punishment on error-based motor learning?

Answer 33

Punishment accelerates learning, and reward increases retention.

This effect of reward has been shown over long term training too, with Abe et al, showing a large difference in error between reward and punishment groups after 30 days of training.

Question 34

What did Dayan et al., (2014) find about brain areas active when receiving reward on a skill/error-based learning task?

Answer 34

Visuo-motor skill-acquisition task with performance feedback either in the presence or absence of reward.

Reward dependence = trial by trial relationship between reward and subsequent performance

Significant relationship between reward dependence and lateral PFC gray matter volumes.

Suggests that effects of reward could manifest in more frontal areas than they do motor areas.

Question 35

What did Goodman et al., (2014) test and find about the effects of reward on stroke rehab?

Answer 35

Tested change in performance on a video game controlled by an ankle of stroke patients. Ankle was attached to an anklebot which would aid and ensure correct movement if the patient could not perform it themselves.

Patients were either in a high (HR) or low reward (LR) group. HR patients received higher levels of praise, in-game prizes and monetary reward. LR patients only received in game reward.

Found that HR group had a greater consistency and accuracy of their movements towards the target, reflecting that some or all of the reward components supplied improved rehabilitation of the ankle for that specific movement.

Question 36

Does reward or punishment seem to have a greater effect on performance and why?

Answer 36

Punishment seems to make particiants care more about what they lose (loss aversion), but more research is needed overall, and in a stroke rehab context, to explore and solidify this assertion.

Question 37

Key reading

Answer 37

Ok chief.