A Common Currency of Motivation: How Curiosity and Reward Shape the Brain’s Memory Systems
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2025-08-21
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en
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Curiosity and reward incentives, respectively representing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, have both been found to be effective motivators of memory formation, but previous findings on a potential interaction effect between the two have not agreed. It is also still not clear how the two motivators are similarly or dissimilarly represented in the brain in support of memory formation, with the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) as a contestant of curiosity processing and the vmPFC and anterior hippocampus as regions in support of value-based, motivated memory. Therefore, we used an adapted version of the trivia paradigm to understand the main effects of curiosity and reward incentives and their interaction on immediate same-day and delayed 7-day later recall performance whilst we recorded participants’ BOLD activity in the MRI scanner. We found that curiosity robustly predicted increased recall likelihood whilst reward incentives improved recall only for the lowest and highest reward levels, and conversely, the interaction effect between curiosity and reward on recall likelihood was found to be significant for medium-high rewards only. Further exploratory analysis showed as the trials progressed, a decreasing and eventually detrimental effect of reward on recall that was ameliorated as curiosity went up. Neurally, we found both positive and negative modulation in the inferior parietal cortex (IPL) and only negative activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in support of both curiosity- and reward-motivated memory. Anterior hippocampal (aHPC) activity during encoding was not found to correlate with motivated memory formation whilst it did positively predict remembered trials over forgotten trials without considering either motivator. Further research should look into more specific IPL hypotheses of motivated memory formation and should focus on anticipatory hippocampal activity, instead of activity during encoding, in support of motivated memory formation. Additionally future work should look at the neural correlates of time-dependent motivated memory effects. Our findings can inform both educational researchers and educators to look out for temporally-dynamic negative effects of extrinsic rewards on memory formation – and the potential benefit of high curiosity-fostering study material in reducing their effect.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen