The motivation to move
Suppose you had $1,000 to invest in the stock market. How would you decide to pick one stock over another? Scientists have made great progress in understanding the neuroscience behind how people choose between similar options. But what happens when neither choice is right? During an economic downturn, for instance, your best option might be not to invest at all, but to wait for market conditions to improve. Using an unusual decision-making study, Harvard researchers exploring the question of motivation found that rats will perform a task faster or slower depending on the size of the benefit they receive, suggesting that they maintain a long-term estimate of whether it’s worth it to them to invest energy in a task. As described in an April 14 paper in Nature Neuroscience, a research team led by Naoshige Uchida, associate professor of molecular and cellular biology, found that rats averaged how much benefit they received over as...