The interactive role of action-outcome learning and positive affective information in motivating human goal-directed behavior

Most human action is goal-directed, that is, aimed at obtaining desired outcomes. Basically, goal-directed action relies on knowledge about what actions produce a particular outcome and which outcomes are desirable. Research on ideomotor learning provides insight into how action-outcome knowledge is acquired whereas research on incentive learning demonstrates that outcome representations include information about desirability. Recent research indicates that positive events that follow a specific response are represented as desired outcomes by showing that anticipating positive events triggers the associated response and creates a response bias toward positive consequences. Here we extend these findings by further exploring and testing motivational properties pertaining to behavior that is effortful and different from the actions involved in the process of learning to represent actions in terms of desired outcomes. In an action-perception learning task, an object was displayed on the computer-screen either after or before the participant pressed the spacebar, so that the object represented an outcome of the action or not. The object was paired with neutral or positive auditory signals, thus manipulating positive sensations independently from action-outcome learning. Results showed that subjective wanting and actual effort to obtain the object were only enhanced when the object represented an outcome of the action and was presented with a positive signal.