Nils Kolling (INSERM, Lyon) – On the neural substrates of planning, changing motivation and sequential goal pursuit

Deciding between apples and oranges has been an age-old question not just for hungry shoppers but within the field of decision-making research. However, very rarely have researchers considered the possibility to reject either and move on to the next shelf. I have previously argued that such a sequential decision making framework is not just essential for understanding foraging animals, but also ecological, real life, behaviour in humans^1,2. While it is intuitive that real life decision strategies require temporally extended coherent behaviours² and rely on prospection, maintained motivation and sequential adaptation, those cognitive and neural processes remain poorly understand. In the first part of my talk I will present our recent cognitive model for sequential search decisions and its underlying neural dynamics³. In the second part I will further expand into another important element of sustained and sequential behaviours, i.e. intrinsic motivation. In particular, I will focus on the circuits fluctuating with motivation to continue pursuing the current task instead of disengaging, showing task general as well as causal evidence. Lastly, I will talk about ongoing work on sequential incremental goal pursuit and how the nature of decision-making changes with goal progress neurally and behaviourally as participants assess whether to give into temptation or frustration.