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Background Blunted neural reward responsiveness (RR) is observed in youth depression. However, it is unclear whether symptoms of depression experienced early in development relate to adolescent RR beyond current symptoms and, further, whether such relationships with RR differ during two key components of reward processing: anticipation and outcome. Methods Within a prospective longitudinal study oversampled for early depression, children and caregivers completed semiannual diagnostic assessments beginning in preschool. In later adolescence, mean age = 16.49 years (SD = 0.94), youths’ (N = 100) neurophysiological responses to cues signaling likely win and loss and these outcomes were assessed. Longitudinally assessed dimensional depression and externalizing symptoms (often comorbid with depression as well as associated with RR) experienced at different developmental periods (preschool [age 3–5.11 years], school age [6–9.11 years], early adolescence [10–14.11 years], current) were used as simultaneous predictors of event-related potentials indexing anticipatory cue processing (cue-P3) and outcome processing (reward positivity/feedback negativity and feedback-P3). Results Blunted motivated attention to cues signaling likely win (cue-P3) was specifically predicted by early-adolescent depression symptoms. Blunted initial response to win (reward positivity) and loss (feedback negativity) outcomes was specifically predicted by preschool depression symptoms. Blunted motivational salience of win and loss outcomes (feedback-P3) was predicted by cumulative depression, not specific to any developmental stage. Conclusions Although blunted anticipation and outcome RR is a common finding in depression, specific deficits related to motivated attention to cues and initial outcome processing may map onto the developmental course of these symptoms.

Individuals at risk for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders display abnormalities related to motivational salience, or the ability of stimuli to elicit attention due to associations with rewards or punishments. However, the nature of these abnormalities is unclear because most focus on responses to stimuli from broad “pleasant” and “unpleasant” categories and ignore the variation of motivational salience within these categories. In two groups at risk for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders—a Social Anhedonia group and a Psychotic-like Experiences group—and a control group, the current study examined event-related potential components sensitive to motivational salience—the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), reflecting earlier selective attention, and the Late Positive Potential (LPP), reflecting sustained attention. Compared to controls, the Social Anhedonia group showed smaller increases in the EPN in response to erotica and smaller increases in the LPP as the motivational salience of pleasant images increased (excitinglarger increases in LPP amplitudes as the motivational salience of pleasant images increased. Also, both at-risk groups showed larger increases in the LPP to threatening images but smaller increases to mutilation images. These findings suggest that examining abnormalities beyond those associated with broad categories may be a way to identify mechanisms of dysfunction.

Perceived control is a fundamental psychological function that can either boost positive affect or buffer negative affect. The current study addressed the electrophysiological correlates underlying perceived control, as exercised by choice, in the processing of feedback valence. Thirty-six participants performed an EEG choice task during which they received positive or negative feedback following choices made either by themselves or by a computer. Perceived control resulted in an enhanced reward positivity for positive feedback but increased theta power for negative feedback. Further, perceived control led to greater feedback P3 amplitude and delta power, regardless of feedback valence. These results suggest functional heterogeneity of perceived control in feedback processing as diverse as magnifying the reward signal, enhancing the need for control and increasing the motivational salience of outcome irrespective of valence.

Early regular experience with dual-language management is thought to shape executive function (EF) circuitry during development. However, previous investigations of bilingual children's EF have largely focused on behavioral measures, or on cognitive aspects of EF. The first part of this study compared monolingual and bilingual preschoolers’ performance on more purely cognitive and more affective versions of a card-sort task, and the second part investigated Error-related negativity (ERN) event-related potential (ERP) waveforms to understand error-awareness mechanisms underlying task performance. Behavioral results showed bilingual advantages in reaction times but not accuracy, and interaction effects of language background, level of challenge, and affective/motivational salience on reaction times. Electrophysiological results revealed smaller ERN peak amplitudes in bilinguals compared to monolinguals in frontal and frontocentral midline regions. Results highlight that bilingualism may shape motivational mechanisms and neural learning mechanisms such as error-detection, such that bilinguals may be less focused on their errors.

Introduction There is mixed evidence about emotional processing abnormalities in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, with self-reports and clinician ratings indicating significant differences between patients and controls, but studies of in-the-moment, self-reported emotional experience finding only small differences between these groups. The current meta-analysis synthesizes statistics from studies measuring the P3 and LPP, two event-related potential (ERP) components sensitive to attentional allocation, to examine whether patients exhibit ERP response abnormalities to neutral and valenced visual stimuli. Methods Standardized mean amplitudes and standard errors of P3 and/or LPP waveforms (300–2000 ms) in response to neutral and valenced images were calculated for 13 studies (total n = 339 individuals with schizophrenia, 331 healthy controls). Results In response to neutral images, there were very small, non-significant differences in ERP amplitudes between patient and control groups (k = 9; Hedges' g = −0.06, 95% CI: −055, 0.43, p = 0.81). In contrast, patients showed a small, significant reduction in ERP amplitudes compared to controls in response to negative images (k = 13; Hedges' g = −0.32, 95% CI: −0.59, −0.05, p = 0.02) and a small, but nonsignificant, reduction in amplitudes in response to positive images (k = 7; Hedges' g = −0.27, 95% CI: −0.71, 0.18, p = 0.24). Conclusions and implications The current review indicates that compared to controls, patients have slightly diminished P3 and LPP amplitudes in response to positive and negative stimuli. This small reduction may reflect decreased attention allocation, possibly indicating an abnormality during a distinct stage of early processing related to evaluating the motivational salience of a stimulus.

The ability to recognize motivationally salient events and adaptively respond to them is critical for survival. Here, we tested whether dopamine (DA) neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) contribute to this process in both male and female mice. Population recordings of DRNDAneurons during associative learning tasks showed that their activity dynamically tracks the motivational salience, developing excitation to both reward-paired and shock-paired cues. The DRNDAresponse to reward-predicting cues was diminished after satiety, suggesting modulation by internal states. DRNDAactivity was also greater for unexpected outcomes than for expected outcomes. Two-photon imaging of DRNDAneurons demonstrated that the majority of individual neurons developed activation to reward-predicting cues and reward but not to shock-predicting cues, which was surprising and qualitatively distinct from the population results. Performing the same fear learning procedures in freely-moving and head-fixed groups revealed that head-fixation itself abolished the neural response to aversive cues, indicating its modulation by behavioral context. Overall, these results suggest that DRNDAneurons encode motivational salience, dependent on internal and external factors.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTDopamine (DA) contributes to motivational control, composed of at least two functional cell types, one signaling for motivational value and another for motivational salience. Here, we demonstrate that DA neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) encode the motivational salience in associative learning tasks. Neural responses were dynamic and modulated by the animal's internal state. The majority of single-cells developed responses to reward or paired cues, but not to shock-predicting cues. Additional experiments with freely-moving and head-fixed mice showed that head-fixation abolished the development of cue responses during fear learning. This work provides further characterization on the functional roles of overlooked DRNDApopulations and an example that neural responses can be altered by head-fixation, which is commonly used in neuroscience.

The allocation of attention can be modulated by the emotional value of a stimulus. In order to understand the biasing influence of emotion on attention allocation further, we require an animal test of how motivational salience modulates attention. In mice, female odour triggers arousal and elicits emotional responses in males. Here, we determined the extent to which objects labelled with female odour modulated the attention of C57BL/6J male mice. Seven experiments were conducted, using a modified version of the spontaneous Novel Object Recognition task. Attention was operationalised as differential exploration time of identical objects that were labelled with either female mouse odour (O+), a non-social odour, almond odour (Oa) or not labelled with any odour (O-). In some experiments we tested trial unique (novel) objects than never carried an odour (X-). Using this novel object preference test we found that when single objects were presented, as well as when two objects were presented simultaneously (so competed with each other for attention), O+ received preferential attention compared to O-. This result was independent of whether O+ was at a novel or familiar location. When compared with Oa at a novel location, O+ at a familiar location attracted more attention. Compared to X-, O+ received more exploration only when placed at a novel location, but attention to O+ and X- was equivalent when they were placed in a familiar location. These results suggest that C57BL/6J male mice weigh up aspects of odour, object novelty and special novelty for motivational salience, and that, in some instances, female odour elicits more attention (object exploration) compared to other object properties. The findings of this study pave the way to using motivationally-significant odours to modulate the cognitive processes that give rise to differential attention to objects.

Background: Binge Drinking (BD), a highly prevalent drinking pattern among youth, has been linked with anomalies in inhibitory control. However, it is still not well characterized whether the neural mechanisms involved in this process are compromised in binge drinkers (BDs). Furthermore, recent findings suggest that exerting inhibitory control to alcohol-related stimuli requires an increased effort in BDs, relative to controls, but the brain regions subserving these effects have also been scarcely investigated. Here we explored the impact of BD on the pattern of neural activity mediating response inhibition and its modulation by the motivational salience of stimuli (alcohol-related content). Methods: Sixty-seven (36 females) first-year university students, classified as BDs (n = 32) or controls (n = 35), underwent fMRI as they performed an alcohol-cued Go/NoGo task in which pictures of alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages were presented as Go or NoGo stimuli. Results: During successful inhibition trials, BDs relative to controls showed greater activity in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), extending to the anterior insula, a brain region usually involved in response inhibition tasks, despite the lack of behavioral differences between groups. Moreover, BDs displayed increased activity in this region restricted to the right hemisphere when inhibiting a prepotent response to alcohol-related stimuli. Conclusions: The increased neural activity in the IFG/insula during response inhibition in BDs, in the absence of behavioral impairments, could reflect a compensatory mechanism. The findings suggest that response inhibition-related activity in the right IFG/insula is modulated by the motivational salience of stimuli and highlight the role of this brain region in suppressing responses to substance-associated cues. This investigation was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad, Plan Nacional sobre Drogas (PNSD 2015/034), Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (PSI2015-70525-P) co-funded for European Regional Development Fund and Xunta de Galicia (GRC ED431C 2017/06). SS-S was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (BES-2016-076298). JP-G was supported by the FPU program from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (FPU16/01573) SI

Risk and ambiguity are two fundamental parameters in decision making, and it remains elusive whether they are dissociable at the neural level. The current EEG study examined the ERP and oscillatory correlates of neural feedback processing under risky and ambiguous decision making. Participants performed a wheel-of-fortune task and received either gain or nongain feedback following risky or ambiguous gambles while their EEG was recorded. Results revealed that the early, obligatory detection of reward information was not dependent on the nature of the previous gamble, which was reflected by the reward positivity. However, risky gambling seemed to elicit an enhanced cognitive control signal as indexed by theta oscillation, whereas ambiguous gambling increased the affective and motivational salience during feedback processing as represented by the P3 and delta oscillation. Together, our findings suggest that feedback processing during risky and ambiguous decision making taps into common and distinct electrophysiological correlates.

Previous research has shown that feedback evaluation is sensitive to monetary incentive. We investigated whether this sensitivity is driven by motivational salience (the difference between both rewarding and punishing events versus neutral events) or by motivational valence (the difference between rewarding and punishing events). Fifty-seven participants performed a monetary incentive delay task under a gain context, a loss context, and a neutral context with their electroencephalogram recorded. During the time domain, the feedback-related negativity (FRN) showed a motivational salience effect whereas the P3 displayed a reward valence effect. During the time-frequency domain, we observed a motivational salience effect for phase-locked theta power regardless of performance feedback, but a reward valence effect for non-phase-locked theta power in response to unsuccessful feedback. Moreover, we found a reward valence effect for phase-locked delta. These findings thus suggest that the affective modulation on feedback evaluation can be driven either by motivational valence or by motivational salience, which depends on the temporal dynamics (the FRN vs. the P3), the frequency dynamics (theta vs. delta power), as well as the phase dynamics (evoked vs. induced power).

Cues predicting rewards can gain motivational properties and initiate reward-seeking behaviors. Dopamine projections from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are critical in regulating cue-motivated responding. Although, approximately one third of mesoaccumbal projection neurons are GABAergic, it is unclear how this population influences motivational processes and cue processing. This is largely due to our inability to pharmacologically probe circuit level contributions of VTA-GABA, which arises from diverse sources, including multiple GABA afferents, interneurons, and projection neurons. Here we used a combinatorial viral vector approach to restrict activating Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs) to GABA neurons in the VTA of wild-type rats trained to respond during a distinct audiovisual cue for sucrose. We measured different aspects of motivation for the cue or primary reinforcer, while chemogenetically activating either the VTA-GABA neurons or their projections to the NAc. Activation of VTA-GABA neurons decreased cue-induced responding and accuracy, while increasing latencies to respond to the cue and obtain the reward. Perseverative and spontaneous responses decreased, yet the rats persisted in entering the reward cup when the cue and reward were absent. However, activation of the VTA-GABA terminals in the accumbens had no effect on any of these behaviors. Together, we demonstrate that VTA-GABA neuron activity preferentially attenuates the ability of cues to trigger reward-seeking, while some aspects of the motivation for the reward itself are preserved. Additionally, the dense VTA-GABA projections to the NAc do not influence the motivational salience of the cue.

Introduction. Deficits of cognitive functions and motivation are core aspects of schizophrenia. The interaction of these deficits might contribute to impair the ability to flexibly adjust behavior in accordance with one’s intentions and goals. Many studies have focused on the anterior N2 as a correlate of cognitive control based on motivational value. Aims. Given the key role of motivation impairment in schizophrenia as a predictor of functional outcome, we aimed to study the impact of reward- and avoidance-based motivation on cognitive control using N2. Method. Event-related potentials were recorded during the execution of the “Monetary Incentive Delay (MID)” task in 34 patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) stabilized on second-generation antipsychotics and 22 healthy controls (HC). Cognitive domains were assessed using the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery. Negative symptom domains (Avolition/apathy and Expressive deficit), as well as positive and disorganization dimensions were also assessed in SCZ. Results. We did not observe any group difference in N2 amplitude or latency. In HC, N2 amplitude was significantly larger for anticipation of large loss with regard to all reward conditions and for all incentive versus neutral conditions. In SCZ, N2 amplitude did not discriminate between large loss and reward or between incentive and neutral conditions. N2 amplitude was not correlated with psychopathological dimensions or MCCB-assessed cognitive deficits in SCZ. Conclusion. Our data in HC are in line with the hypothesis that N2 amplitude reflects the impact of motivational salience on cognitive control. Our results in SCZ indicate a deficit in the discrimination of motivational salience to the service of cognitive control, independently of psychopathology and other cognitive deficits.

The aim of the study was to investigate the efficiency of the use of response-contingent feedback in adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) by using the balloon analogue risk task (BART). The BIS/BAS scales were also used to evaluate a participant's responses to reward- or punishment-related events in everyday situations. The results showed that adolescents with DLD performed on the BART at a suboptimal level due to inefficient use of response-contingent feedback. Findings of the BIS/BAS scales also generate a possible hypothesis of reduced motivational salience for larger monetary outcomes in DLD. Given that dopamine plays an important role in modulating BART responding through the corticostriatal pathways, these behavioral findings implicate an association between dopamine and individual differences in language, including DLD. Future studies are needed to directly test whether people with DLD have reduced level of dopamine in striatal neural synapses, leading to dopamine-dependent learning difficulty.

Facial expressions of emotion have an undeniable processing advantage over neutral faces, discernible both at behavioral level and in emotion-related modulations of several event-related potentials (ERPs). Recently it was proposed that also inherently neutral stimuli might gain salience through associative learning mechanisms. The present study investigated whether acquired motivational salience leads to processing advantages similar to biologically determined origins of inherent emotional salience by applying an associative learning paradigm to human face processing. Participants (N=24) were trained to categorize neutral faces to salience categories by receiving different monetary outcomes. ERPs were recorded in a subsequent test phase consisting of gender decisions on previously associated faces, as well as on familiarized and novel faces expressing happy, angry or no emotion. Previously reward-associated faces boosted the P1 component, indicating that acquired reward-associations modulate early sensory processing in extrastriate visual cortex. However, ERP modulations to emotional - primarily angry - expressions expanded to subsequent processing stages, as reflected in well-established emotion-related ERPs. The present study offers new evidence that motivational salience associated to inherently neutral stimuli can sharpen sensory encoding but does not obligatorily lead to preferential processing at later stages.

Motivationally relevant stimuli benefit from strengthened sensory processing. It is unclear, however, if motivational value of positive and negative valence has similar or dissociable effects on early visual processing. Moreover, whether these perceptual effects are task-specific, stimulus-specific, or more generally feature-based is unknown. In this study, we compared the effects of positive and negative motivational value on early sensory processing using ERPs. We tested the extent to which these effects could generalize to new task contexts and to stimuli sharing common features with the motivationally significant ones. At the behavioral level, stimuli paired with positive incentives were learned faster than stimuli paired with neutral or negative outcomes. The ERP results showed that monetary loss elicited higher neural activity in V1 (at the C1 level) compared with reward, whereas the latter influenced postperceptual processing stages (P300). Importantly, the early loss-related effect generalized to new contexts and to new stimuli with common features, whereas the later reward effects did not spill over to the new context. These results suggest that acquired negative motivational salience can influence early sensory processing by means of plastic changes in feature-based processing in V1.

Author(s): Guillot, Casey R; Halliday, Teresa M; Kirkpatrick, Matthew G; Pang, Raina D; Leventhal, Adam M | Abstract: IntroductionAnhedonia-diminished interest or pleasure in response to rewards-is a dimension implicated in several psychiatric disorders linked to smoking. This laboratory study sought to identify motivational mechanisms linking anhedonia and tobacco addiction by testing the hypothesis that anhedonia, abstinence, and their interaction would predict excesses and deficits in the perceived pleasantness of smoking-related and positive pictures, respectively. We assessed the pleasantness of negative pictures as a secondary outcome.MethodsAfter a baseline session involving self-report measures of anhedonia and other factors, 125 regular smokers attended two counterbalanced experimental sessions (overnight abstinent and non-abstinent) at which they rated the pleasantness of positive, smoking-related, negative, and neutral (control) pictures presented via computer. The difference in pleasantness ratings of positive, smoking-related, and negative pictures relative to neutral pictures served as the index of participants' appraisal of the motivational salience of nondrug reward, drug reward, and aversive signals, respectively.ResultsWith and without adjusting for sex and depressive symptoms, greater anhedonia significantly or marginally predicted greater pleasantness of smoking (vs. neutral), lower pleasantness of positive (vs. neutral), less unpleasantness of negative (vs. neutral) pictures (|βs| = 0.18 to 0.35, ps = .007 to .07). Anhedonia by abstinence interaction effects on pleasantness ratings of each stimulus category (vs. neutral) were not significant (|βs| ≤ 0.02, ps ≥ .36).ConclusionsAnhedonia and abstinence additively increase the salience of smoking-related cues in anhedonic smokers. Smoking cessation efforts that attenuate sensitization to smoking stimuli may benefit anhedonic smokers early in quit attempts.ImplicationsTaken together, these findings provide tentative evidence that anhedonia is associated with a relative imbalance in the motivational salience of drug relative to nondrug rewards and may be associated with a generalized hypo-reactivity to both positive and negative stimuli. Though some prior smoking research has evidenced this relative imbalance in anhedonia with self-report or a smoking-choice task, we additionally show that this pattern may extend to hyper-affective reactivity to smoking-related stimuli being coincident with hypo-affective reactivity to nondrug-related positive stimuli (ie, may extend to greater pleasantness ratings of smoking pictures being accompanied by lower pleasantness ratings of positive pictures).

The development of drug addiction is associated with functional adaptations within the reward circuitry, within which the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is anatomically positioned as an interface between motivational salience and behavioral output. The functional output of NAc is profoundly altered after exposure to drugs of abuse, and some of the functional changes continue to evolve during drug abstinence, contributing to numerous emotional and motivational alterations related drug taking, seeking, and relapse. As in most brain regions, the functional output of NAc is critically dependent on the dynamic interaction between excitation and inhibition. One of the most prominent sources of inhibition within the NAc arises from fast-spiking interneurons (FSIs). Each NAc FSI innervates hundreds of principal neurons, and orchestrates population activity through its powerful and sustained feedforward inhibition. While the role of NAc FSIs in the context of drug addiction remains poorly understood, emerging evidence suggests that FSIs and FSI-mediated local circuits are key targets for drugs of abuse to tilt the functional output of NAc toward a motivational state favoring drug seeking and relapse. In this review, we discuss recent findings and our conceptualization about NAc FSI-mediated regulation of motivated and cocaine-induced behaviors. We hope that the conceptual framework proposed in this review may provide a useful guidance for ongoing and future studies to determine how FSIs influence the function of NAc and related reward circuits, ultimately leading to addictive behaviors.

Emotionally arousing cues automatically attract attentional resources, which may be at the cost of processing task-related information. Of central importance is how the visual system resolves competition for processing resources among stimuli differing in motivational salience. Here, we assessed the extent and time-course of competition between emotionally arousing distractors and task-related stimuli in a frequency-tagging paradigm. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were evoked using random-dot kinematograms that consisted of rapidly flickering (8.57 Hz) dots, superimposed upon emotional or neutral distractor pictures flickering at 12 Hz. The time-varying amplitude of the ssVEP evoked by the motion detection task showed a significant reduction to the task-relevant stream while emotionally arousing pictures were presented as distractors. Competition between emotionally arousing pictures and moving dots began 450 ms after picture onset and persisted for an additional 2600 ms. Competitive effects of the overlapping task and picture stream revealed cost effects for the motion detection task when unpleasant pictures were presented as distractors between 450 and 1650 ms after picture onset, where an increase in ssVEP amplitude to the flickering picture stimulus was at the cost of ssVEP amplitude to the flickering dot stimulus. Cost effects were generalized to all emotionally arousing contents between 1850 and 3050 ms after picture onset, where the greatest amount of competition was evident for conditions in which emotionally arousing pictures, compared to neutral, served as distractors. In sum, the processing capacity of the visual system as measured by ssVEPs is limited, resulting in prioritized processing of emotionally relevant cues.

Bipolar spectrum and unipolar depressive disorders have been associated with distinct and opposite profiles of reward-related neural activity. These opposite profiles may reflect a differential preexisting vulnerability for both types of disorders. In support, recent ERP studies find that, following reward feedback, a larger reward positivity (RewP) is associated with greater vulnerability for bipolar spectrum disorders, whereas a smaller RewP is associated with greater vulnerability for depression. However, prior studies have investigated only immediate rewards and have not examined dimensions of both bipolar disorder and unipolar depression within the same sample. The present study is the first to investigate feedback-related ERP correlates of proneness to hypomania and unipolar depressive tendencies within the same sample and to expand our scope to include future rewards. Participants completed a modified time estimation task where the same monetary reward was available immediately or at one of five different future dates. Results revealed proneness to hypomania and unipolar depressive tendencies were related to an elevated and blunted RewP, respectively, but only following immediate rewards (i.e., today). Following rewards in the distant future (e.g., 8 months), proneness to hypomania and depressive tendencies were associated with elevated and blunted amplitudes for the P3, respectively, a subsequent ERP component reflecting motivational salience during extended feedback processing. Furthermore, these opposing profiles were independent of, and significantly different from, one another. These results suggest that feedback-related ERPs following immediate and future rewards are candidate biomarkers that can physiologically separate vulnerability for bipolar spectrum from unipolar depressive disorders.

It has been shown that when incentives are provided during movement preparation, activity in parieto-frontal regions reflects both expected value and motivational salience. Yet behavioral work suggests that the processing of rewards is faster than for punishments, raising the possibility that expected value and motivational salience manifest at different latencies during movement planning. Given the role of beta oscillations (13–30 Hz) in movement preparation and in communication within the reward circuit, this study investigated how beta activity is modulated by positive and negative monetary incentives during reach planning, and in particular whether it reflects expected value and motivational salience at different latencies. Electroencephalography was recorded while male and female humans performed a reaching task in which reward or punishment delivery depended on movement accuracy. Before a preparatory delay period, participants were informed of the consequences of hitting or missing the target, according to four experimental conditions: Neutral (hit/miss:+0/−0¢), Reward (hit/miss:+5/−0¢), Punish (hit/miss:+0/−5¢) and Mixed (hit/miss:+5/−5¢). Results revealed that beta power over parieto-frontal regions was strongly modulated by incentives during the delay period, with power positively correlating with movement times. Interestingly, beta power was selectively sensitive to potential rewards early in the delay period, after which it came to reflect motivational salience as movement onset neared. These results demonstrate that beta activity reflects expected value and motivational salience on different time scales during reach planning. They also provide support for models that link beta activity with basal ganglia and dopamine for the allocation of neural resources according to behavioral salience.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTThe present work demonstrates that pre-movement parieto-frontal beta power is modulated by monetary incentives in a goal-directed reaching task. Specifically, beta power transiently scaled with the availability of rewards early in movement planning, before reflecting motivational salience as movement onset neared. Moreover, pre-movement beta activity correlated with the vigor of the upcoming movement. These findings suggest that beta oscillations reflect neural processes that mediate the invigorating effect of incentives on motor performance, possibly through dopamine-mediated interactions with the basal ganglia.

It is widely believed that females outperformed males in emotional information processing. The present study tested whether the female superiority in emotional information processing exists in a naturalistic social-emotional context, if so, what the temporal dynamics underlies. The behavioral and electrophysiological responses were recorded while participants were performing an interpersonal gambling game with opponents’ facial emotions given as feedback. The results yielded that emotional cues modulated the influence of monetary feedback on outcome valuation. Critically, this modulation was more conspicuous in females: opponents’ angry expressions increased females’ risky tendency and decreased the amplitude of reward positivity (RewP) and feedback P300. These findings indicate that females are more sensitive to emotional expressions in real interpersonal interactions, which is manifested in both early motivational salience detection and late conscious cognitive appraisal stages of feedback processing.

In comparison to neutral faces, facial expressions of emotion are known to gain attentional prioritization, mainly demonstrated by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Recent evidence indicated that such a preferential processing can also be elicited by neutral faces when associated with increased motivational salience via reward. It remains, however, an open question whether impacts of inherent emotional salience and associated motivational salience might be integrated. To this aim, expressions and outcomes were orthogonally combined. Participants (N=42) learned to explicitly categorize happy and neutral faces as either reward- or zero-outcome-related via an associative learning paradigm. ERP components (P1, N170, EPN, and LPC) were measured throughout the experiment, and separately analyzed before (learning phase) and after (consolidation phase) reaching a pre-defined learning criterion. Happy facial expressions boosted early processing stages, as reflected in enhanced amplitudes of the N170 and EPN, both during learning and consolidation. In contrast, effects of monetary reward became evident only after successful learning and in form of enlarged amplitudes of the LPC, a component linked to higher-order evaluations. Interactions between expressions and associated outcome were absent in all ERP components of interest. The present study provides novel evidence that acquired salience impacts stimulus processing but independent of the effects driven by happy facial expressions.

Affective neuroscience research has revealed that reward contains separable components of ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning. Here we focus on current ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’ findings and applications to clinical disorders. ‘Liking’ is the hedonic impact derived from a pleasant experience, and is amplified by opioid and related signals in discrete sites located in limbic-related brain areas. ‘Wanting’ refers to incentive salience, a motivation process for reward, and is mediated by larger systems involving mesocorticolimbic dopamine. Deficits in incentive salience may contribute to avolitional features of depression and related disorders, whereas deficits in hedonic impact may produce true anhedonia. Excesses in incentive salience, on the other hand, can lead to addiction, especially when narrowly focused on a particular target. Finally, a fearful form of motivational salience may even contribute to some paranoia symptoms of schizophrenia and related disorders.

In everyday life, the motivational value of faces is bound to the contexts in which faces are perceived. Electrophysiological studies have demonstrated that inherent negatively valent contexts modulate cortical face processing as assessed with ERP components. However, it is not well understood whether learned (rather than inherent) and three-dimensional aversive contexts similarly modulate the neural processing of faces. Using full immersive virtual reality (VR) and mobile EEG techniques, 25 participants underwent a differential fear conditioning paradigm, in which one virtual room was paired with an aversive noise burst (threat context) and another with a nonaversive noise burst (safe context). Subsequently, avatars with neutral or angry facial expressions were presented in the threat and safe contexts while EEG was recorded. Analysis of the late positive potential (LPP), which presumably indicates motivational salience, revealed a significant interaction of context (threat vs. safe) and face type (neutral vs. angry). Neutral faces evoked increased LPP amplitudes in threat versus safe contexts, while angry faces evoked increased early LPP amplitudes regardless of context. In addition to indicating that threat-conditioned contexts alter the processing of ambiguous faces, the present study demonstrates the successful integration of EEG and VR with particular relevance for affective neuroscience research.

The present study aimed at investigating whether associated motivational salience causes preferential processing of inherently neutral faces similar to emotional expressions by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and changes of the pupil size. To this aim, neutral faces were implicitly associated with monetary outcome, while participants (N = 44) performed a face-matching task with masked primes that ensured performance around chance level and thus an equal proportion of gain, loss, and zero outcomes. During learning, motivational context strongly impacted the processing of the fixation, prime and mask stimuli prior to the target face, indicated by enhanced amplitudes of subsequent ERP components and increased pupil size. In a separate test session, previously associated faces as well as novel faces with emotional expressions were presented within the same task but without motivational context and performance feedback. Most importantly, previously gain-associated faces amplified the LPC, although the individually contingent face-outcome assignments were not made explicit during the learning session. Emotional expressions impacted the N170 and EPN components. Modulations of the pupil size were absent in both motivationally-associated and emotional conditions. Our findings demonstrate that neural representations of neutral stimuli can acquire increased salience via implicit learning, with an advantage for gain over loss associations.

Background Anhedonia, the reduced capacity to experience pleasure, has long been regarded as a cardinal symptom in depression and schizophrenia. Recent evidence highlights that anhedonia is not a single construct but consists of an anticipatory component and a consummatory component, which is captured by the Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS). The current event-related potential study examined the electrophysiological underpinnings of anticipatory and consummatory aspects of anhedonia as assessed by the TEPS in a non-clinical sample. Methods EEG was recorded during both anticipatory and consummatory phases of incentive processing in an anticipatory-anhedonia (ANT) group, a consummatory-anhedonia (CON) group, and a control (CNT) group selected from a large sample based on their TEPS scores. Results The ANT relative to the CON group exhibited a reduced cue-P3 during the anticipatory phase, a less positive feedback-related negativity (FRN) and a blunted feedback P3 (fb-P3) during the consummatory phase. Moreover, correlation results revealed a dissociation between anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia, which occurred in an unexpected way such that higher levels of anticipatory anhedonia were associated with reduced fb-P3 amplitudes whereas higher levels of consummatory anhedonia with enhanced cue-P3 and FRN amplitudes. Limitation The sample size for each group was relatively small. Conclusions Anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia as measured by the TEPS might be driven by abnormal motivational salience, which was represented by the cue-P3 during the anticipatory phase and the FRN and fb-P3 during the consummatory phase of incentive processing.

Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area use glutamate as a cotransmitter. To elucidate the behavioral role of the cotransmission, we targeted the glutamate-recycling enzyme glutaminase (gene Gls1). In mice with a dopamine transporter (Slc6a3)-driven conditional heterozygous (cHET) reduction of Gls1 in their dopamine neurons, dopamine neuron survival and transmission were unaffected, while glutamate cotransmission at phasic firing frequencies was reduced, enabling a selective focus on the cotransmission. The mice showed normal emotional and motor behaviors, and an unaffected response to acute amphetamine. Strikingly, amphetamine sensitization was reduced and latent inhibition potentiated. These behavioral effects, also seen in global GLS1 HETs with a schizophrenia resilience phenotype, were not seen in mice with an Emx1-driven forebrain reduction affecting most brain glutamatergic neurons. Thus, a reduction in dopamine neuron glutamate cotransmission appears to mediate significant components of the GLS1 HET schizophrenia resilience phenotype, and glutamate cotransmission appears to be important in attribution of motivational salience. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27566.001, eLife digest A small cluster of neurons found in the midbrain use dopamine to send signals to neurons involved in many processes including motivation and attention. Drugs of abuse such as amphetamine co-opt motivation by increasing dopamine signaling. When used excessively, the drugs can engender delusional thinking, as is seen in schizophrenia. In contrast, the drugs used to treat schizophrenia block excess dopamine signaling. Recently it has been shown that dopamine neurons in the middle part of the midbrain release both dopamine and glutamate. The exact role of this dopamine neuron glutamate signaling has been difficult to find out. Previous experiments involved genetically modifying dopamine neurons so that they would not release glutamate. However, this affected how the neurons develop, making it difficult to discern the effects of glutamate signaling. Now, in genetically modified mice that have less glutaminase in their dopamine neurons than normal, Mingote et al. find that glutamate signaling is reduced just when dopamine neurons fire more rapidly. This did not change how dopamine neurons develop or how they use dopamine to signal. This reduction in dopamine neuron glutamate signaling affects two behaviors that are driven by the activity of dopamine neurons. First, it reduces the effects of a process called amphetamine sensitization, in which repeated doses of amphetamine increase dopamine neuron signaling so that events associated with drug use take up more attention than they normally would. Second, the modified mice were better able to ignore familiar, irrelevant sounds in their environment; the mice continued to pay less attention to a familiar sound, even when it was paired with a shock and came to predict an unpleasant event – a process known as potentiation of latent inhibition. The effects on both of these processes suggest that dopamine neuron glutamate signaling helps animals decide which features of their environment are most important. This result suggests a new way of treating schizophrenia. When humans take amphetamine repeatedly, which produces sensitization, they can develop psychosis, a principal symptom of schizophrenia. During a period of psychosis, thoughts and perceptions are disturbed, making it difficult to distinguish between relevant or irrelevant things in the environment. By reducing amphetamine sensitization and potentiating latent inhibition, blocking dopamine neuron glutamate signaling might help to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27566.002

The mammalian prefrontal cortex (PFC) serves as a functional nexus point controlling subcortical neural reward and motivational pathways. The process of addiction involves the aberrant amplification of reward signals associated with drugs of abuse and the formation of powerful associative memories linked to the drug-taking experience. Our understanding of how the mammalian PFC regulates subcortical neural reward pathways has revealed remarkable insights into the complexity of addiction-related neuropathological and psychological factors. In this chapter, we review evidence from both animal models of addiction, as well as human brain imaging studies that have identified various functional roles for PFC dysfunction in the etiology and persistence of addiction-related behavioral and neural pathology. Specifically, disturbances in the ability of the PFC to modulate and control subcortical neural systems involved in signaling reward and impulse control may ultimately lead to the aberrant motivational salience, dependence, and chronic relapse associated with drugs of abuse.

Auditory attention theories suggest that humans are able to decompose the complex acoustic input into separate auditory streams, which then compete for attentional resources. How this attentional competition is influenced by motivational salience of sounds is, however, not well-understood. Here, we investigated whether a positive motivational value associated with sounds could bias the attentional selection in an auditory detection task. Participants went through a reward-learning period, where correct attentional selection of one stimulus (CS+) lead to higher rewards compared to another stimulus (CS−). We assessed the impact of reward-learning by comparing perceptual sensitivity before and after the learning period, when CS+ and CS− were presented as distractors for a different target. Performance decreased after reward-learning when CS+ was a distractor, while it increased when CS− was a distractor. Thus, the findings show that sounds that were associated with high rewards captures attention involuntarily. Additionally, when successful inhibition of a particular sound (CS−) was associated with high rewards then it became easier to ignore it. The current findings have important implications for the understanding of the organizing principles of auditory perception and provide, for the first time, clear behavioral evidence for reward-dependent attentional learning in the auditory domain in humans.

International audience; The study of food aversion in humans by the induction of illness is ethically unthinkable, and it is difficult to propose a type of food that is disgusting for everybody. However, although cheese is considered edible by most people, it can also be perceived as particularly disgusting to some individuals. As such, the perception of cheese constitutes a good model to study the cerebral processes of food disgust and aversion. In this study, we show that a higher percentage of people are disgusted by cheese than by other types of food. Functional magnetic resonance imaging then reveals that the internal and external globus pallidus and the substantia nigra belonging to the basal ganglia are more activated in participants who dislike or diswant to eat cheese (Anti) than in other participants who like to eat cheese, as revealed following stimulation with cheese odors and pictures. We suggest that the aforementioned basal ganglia structures commonly involved in reward are also involved in the aversive motivated behaviors. Our results further show that the ventral pallidum, a core structure of the reward circuit, is deactivated in Anti subjects stimulated by cheese in the wanting task, highlighting the suppression of motivation-related activation in subjects disgusted by cheese.

Both behavioral and neural measures of the motivational salience of faces are positively correlated with their physical attractiveness. Whether physical characteristics other than attractiveness contribute to the motivational salience of faces is not known, however. Research with male macaques recently showed that more dominant macaques' faces hold greater motivational salience. Here we investigated whether dominance also contributes to the motivational salience of faces in human participants. Principal component analysis of third-party ratings of faces for multiple traits revealed two orthogonal components. The first component ("valence") was highly correlated with rated trustworthiness and attractiveness. The second component ("dominance") was highly correlated with rated dominance and aggressiveness. Importantly, both components were positively and independently related to the motivational salience of faces, as assessed from responses on a standard key-press task. These results show that at least two dissociable components underpin the motivational salience of faces in humans and present new evidence for similarities in how humans and non-human primates respond to facial cues of dominance.

Food reward sensitivity may influence individual susceptibility to an environment replete with highly palatable foods of minimal nutritional value. These foods contain combinations of added sugar, fat, and/or salt that may enhance their motivational salience. This study examined associations of food reward sensitivity with eating behaviors in the NEXT Generation Health Study, a nationally representative sample of U.S. young adults. Participants (n = 2202) completed self-report measures including the Power of Food Scale, assessing food reward sensitivity, and intake frequency of 14 food groups. Multiple linear regressions estimated associations of food reward sensitivity with each of the eating behaviors adjusting for covariates. Higher food reward sensitivity was associated with more frequent intake of fast food (b ± linearized SE = 0.24 ± 0.05, p

The primary goal of the present study was to investigate how positive and negative feedback may differently facilitate learning throughout development. In addition, the role of motivation as a modulating factor was examined. Participants (children, adolescents, and adults) completed two forms of the guess and application task (GAT). Feedback from the Cool-GAT task has low motivational salience because there are no consequences, while feedback from the Hot-GAT task has high motivational salience as it pertains to receiving a reward. The results indicated that negative feedback leads to a reduction in learning compared to positive feedback. The effect of negative feedback was greater in adolescent participants compared to children and adults in the Hot-GAT task, suggesting an interaction between age and motivation level on learning. Further analysis indicated that greater risk was associated with a greater reduction in learning from negative feedback and again, the reduction was greatest in adolescents. In summary, the current study supports the idea that learning from positive feedback and negative feedback differs throughout development. In a rule-based learning task, when associative learning is primarily in practice, participants learned less from negative feedback. This reduction is amplified during adolescence when task-elicited motivation is high.

The overlap between pain and reward processing pathways leds researchers to hypothesize that there are interactions between them in the human brain. Two hypotheses have been proposed. The “competition hypothesis” posits that reward can reduce pain-related neural activity and vice versa. The “salience hypothesis” suggests that the motivational salience of pain and reward can be mutually reinforced. However, no study has tested these two hypotheses from temporal perspective as we know. In the present study, pictures depicted other people in painful or non-painful situations were used to indicate the valence of outcomes in a gambling task. The event-related potential results revealed an interaction between another person’s pain and outcome valence in multiple time stages. Specifically, the amplitudes of the N1 and P3 were enhanced in the win condition compared with the loss condition when the outcome was indicated by painful picture. This interactions between pain and reward support the salience hypothesis but not the competition hypothesis. The present results provide evidence from human subjects that support the salience hypothesis, which claims that observing other people’s pain can enhance the salience of reward.

Drug-associated cues exposure to induce extinction is a useful strategy to contrast cue-induced drug seeking. Treatments aimed at reducing motivational properties of cues are considered highly promising since they could decrease their ability to induce drug-conditioned behaviors. Norepinephrine (NE) in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is critical for attribution of motivational salience to highly salient stimuli, suggesting a major role in prelimbic (PL) mpFC to modulate the motivational properties of drug-related cues, invigorating them, and consequently, delaying extinction. To investigate if NE in PL fosters the maintenance of drug-seeking behavior, we assessed its role on amphetamine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP). Moreover, to affirm the specificity of NE in PL, we also assessed the role of NE in the infralimbic (IL) mPFC. The effects of selective NE depletion in the PL or in the IL of C57BL/6J mice were assessed on the expression of amphetamine-induced CPP before and after extinction procedure. NE-depleted mice in PL extinguished preference for Amph-paired chamber long before sham animals. By contrast, IL-depleted animals maintained place preference for more than 4 weeks after the procedure of extinction, having at that moment interrupted the test. Inactivation of NE in PL cortex blunts amphetamine-induced CPP, thus fostering extinction and showing to be critical for the maintenance of conditioned Amph-seeking behavior. Opposite effects of NE depletion in IL, seemingly in agreement with literature on extinction, are discussed in terms of balance of activity between PL and IL in extinction.

Dopamine neurotransmission has long been identified as a key component of prefrontal cortical function and flexible cognition; however, flexible behavior does not depend solely on dopamine. Together, multiple systems allow fast and flexible behavior in the face of a constantly changing environment. This Research Topic illuminates work by researchers who are leading efforts to understand how different neural systems yield flexible behavior.

Human prosociality is often assumed to emerge from exerting reflective control over initial, selfish impulses. However, recent findings suggest that prosocial actions can also stem from processes that are fast, automatic and intuitive. Here, we attempt to clarify when prosocial behavior may be intuitive by examining prosociality as a form of reward seeking. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we explored whether a neural signature that rapidly encodes the motivational salience of an event-the P300-can predict intuitive prosocial motivation. Participants allocated varying amounts of money between themselves and charities they initially labelled as high- or low-empathy targets under conditions that promoted intuitive or reflective decision making. Consistent with our predictions, P300 amplitude over centroparietal regions was greater when giving involved high-empathy targets than low-empathy targets, but only when deciding under intuitive conditions. Reflective conditions, alternatively, elicited an earlier frontocentral positivity related to response inhibition, regardless of target. Our findings suggest that during prosocial decision making, larger P300 amplitude could (i) signal intuitive prosocial motivation and (ii) predict subsequent engagement in prosocial behavior. This work offers novel insight into when prosociality may be driven by intuitive processes and the roots of such behaviors.

The factors that contribute to individual differences in the reward value of cute infant facial characteristics are poorly understood. Here we show that the effect of cuteness on a behavioural measure of the reward value of infant faces is greater among women reporting strong maternal tendencies. By contrast, maternal tendencies did not predict women's subjective ratings of the cuteness of these infant faces. These results show, for the first time, that the reward value of infant facial cuteness is greater among women who report being more interested in interacting with infants, implicating maternal tendencies in individual differences in the reward value of infant cuteness. Moreover, our results indicate that the relationship between maternal tendencies and the reward value of infant facial cuteness is not due to individual differences in women's ability to detect infant cuteness. This latter result suggests that individual differences in the reward value of infant cuteness are not simply a by-product of low-cost, functionless biases in the visual system.

The attribution of incentive salience to reward associated cues is critical for motivation and the pursuit of rewards. Disruptions in the integrity of the neural systems controlling these processes can lead to avolition and anhedonia, symptoms that cross the diagnostic boundaries of many neuropsychiatric illnesses. Here, we consider whether the habenula (Hb), a region recently demonstrated to encode negatively valenced events, also modulates the attribution of incentive salience to a neutral cue predicting a food reward. The Pavlovian autoshaping paradigm was used in the rat as an investigative tool to dissociate Pavlovian learning processes imparting strictly predictive value from learning that attributes incentive motivational value. Electrolytic lesions of the fasciculus retroflexus (fr), the sole pathway through which descending Hb efferents are conveyed, significantly increased incentive salience as measured by conditioned approaches to a cue light predictive of reward. Conversely, generation of a fictive Hb signal via fr stimulation during CS+ presentation significantly decreased the incentive salience of the predictive cue. Neither manipulation altered the reward predictive value of the cue as measured by conditioned approach to the food. Our results provide new evidence supporting a significant role for the Hb in governing the attribution of incentive motivational salience to reward predictive cues and further imply that pathological changes in Hb activity could contribute to the aberrant pursuit of debilitating goals or avolition and depression-like symptoms.

BACKGROUND: Bradykinesia is a cardinal feature of Parkinson's disease (PD). Despite its disabling impact, the precise cause of this symptom remains elusive. Recent thinking suggests that bradykinesia may be more than simply a manifestation of motor slowness, and may in part reflect a specific deficit in the operation of motivational vigour in the striatum. In this paper we test the hypothesis that movement time in PD can be modulated by the specific nature of the motivational salience of possible action-outcomes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We developed a novel movement time paradigm involving winnable rewards and avoidable painful electrical stimuli. The faster the subjects performed an action the more likely they were to win money (in appetitive blocks) or to avoid a painful shock (in aversive blocks). We compared PD patients when OFF dopaminergic medication with controls. Our key finding is that PD patients OFF dopaminergic medication move faster to avoid aversive outcomes (painful electric shocks) than to reap rewarding outcomes (winning money) and, unlike controls, do not speed up in the current trial having failed to win money in the previous one. We also demonstrate that sensitivity to distracting stimuli is valence specific. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We suggest this pattern of results can be explained in terms of low dopamine levels in the Parkinsonian state leading to an insensitivity to appetitive outcomes, and thus an inability to modulate movement speed in the face of rewards. By comparison, sensitivity to aversive stimuli is relatively spared. Our findings point to a rarely described property of bradykinesia in PD, namely its selective regulation by everyday outcomes.

Infant facial features are thought to be powerful elicitors of caregiving behaviour. It has been widely assumed that men and women respond in different ways to these features, such as a large forehead and eyes and round protrouding cheeks, colloquially described as 'cute'. We investigated experimentally potential differences using measures of both conscious appraisal ('liking') and behavioural responsivity ('wanting') to real world infant and adult faces in 71 non-parents. Overall, women gave significantly higher 'liking' ratings for infant faces (but not adult faces) compared to men. However, this difference was not seen in the 'wanting' task, where we measured the willingness of men and women to key-press to increase or decrease viewing duration of an infant face. Further analysis of sensitivity to cuteness, categorising infants by degree of infantile features, revealed that both men and women showed a graded significant increase in both positive attractiveness ratings and viewing times to the 'cutest' infants. We suggest that infant faces may have a similar motivational salience to men and women, despite gender idiosyncrasies in their conscious appraisal.

SummaryBoth reward- and punishment-related stimuli are motivationally salient and attract the attention of animals. However, it remains unclear how motivational salience is processed in the brain. Here, we show that both reward- and punishment-predicting stimuli elicited robust bursting of many noncholinergic basal forebrain (BF) neurons in behaving rats. The same BF neurons also responded with similar bursting to primary reinforcement of both valences. Reinforcement responses were modulated by expectation, with surprising reinforcement eliciting stronger BF bursting. We further demonstrate that BF burst firing predicted successful detection of near-threshold stimuli. Together, our results point to the existence of a salience-encoding system independent of stimulus valence. We propose that the encoding of motivational salience by ensemble bursting of noncholinergic BF neurons may improve behavioral performance by affecting the activity of widespread cortical circuits and therefore represents a novel candidate mechanism for top-down attention.

OBJECTIVE: It has been suggested that positive psychotic symptoms reflect 'aberrant salience'. Previously we provided support for this hypothesis in first-episode schizophrenia patients, demonstrating that delusional symptoms were associated with aberrant reward processing, indexed by the Salience Attribution Test (SAT). Here we tested whether salience processing is abnormal in schizophrenia patients with long-standing treatment-refractory persistent delusions (TRS). METHOD: Eighteen medicated TRS patients and 31 healthy volunteers completed the SAT, on which participants made a speeded response to earn money in the presence of cues. Each cue comprised two visual dimensions, colour and form. Reinforcement probability varied over one of these dimensions (task-relevant), but not the other (task-irrelevant). RESULTS: Participants responded significantly faster on high-probability relative to low-probability trials, representing implicit adaptive salience; this effect was intact in TRS patients. By contrast, TRS patients were impaired on the explicit adaptive salience measure, rating high-probability stimuli less likely to be associated with reward than controls. There was little evidence for elevated aberrant salience in the TRS group. CONCLUSION: These findings do not support the hypothesis that persistent delusions are related to aberrant motivational salience processing in TRS patients. However, they do support the view that patients with schizophrenia have impaired reward learning.