Study of Brain and Behavior in Valuing Physical and Mental Effort with Fatigue and Motivation Effects

What this Trial Is About

Researchers are exploring how people perceive the effort needed to perform physical and cognitive tasks, focusing on how fatigue and motivation affect these perceptions. The study aims to understand the brain and behavior mechanisms behind subjective effort valuation, which plays a key role in decision-making and motivation. Using healthy adult volunteers, the research seeks to identify common and unique brain systems involved in evaluating physical and cognitive effort and how these are influenced by fatigue and motivation. Participants will engage in several behavioral interventions including repeated cognitively demanding tasks to induce cognitive fatigue, repeated physically demanding tasks involving grip force exertion to induce physical fatigue, and exposure to reward-associated stimuli to study how motivation affects effort choices. These tasks are designed to evoke fatigue and motivational changes and assess their impact on effort valuation through behavioral and neural measures. Throughout the study, participants subjective valuation of effort will be measured using behavioral choice data before and after fatigue induction and motivational manipulation. Functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI will be used to observe brain regions involved in encoding effort valuation and changes due to fatigue and motivation. The study evaluates multiple outcome measures related to cognitive and physical effort parameters and brain activity. Participation involves a total duration of one day for primary outcomes assessment, focusing on understanding effort valuation mechanisms and their neural correlates.

Behavioral and Neural Representations of Subjective Effort Cost