Topic: behavioral performance

Social memory, one's ability to recognize and remember experiences with other conspecifics, consists of several discrete psychological processes. These include the ability to rapidly detect whether an individual is novel or familiar (“I know that person, but from where?”) and the recollection of an individual’s specific identity and the associated set of past experiences (“ah, we met at COSYNE last year”). These processes have conflicting demands and requirements. Familiarity is an abstract concept that can readily generalize to any individual in any context. In contrast, social episodes consi

The medial enthorhinal cortex (MEC) is a core brain region involved in spatial navigation, and provides navigational information to the downstream hippocampus. Neurons in the MEC respond to an animal's location and heading direction in an environment, as well as boundaries and an animals' distance from objects. Other studies have demonstrated that MEC neurons respond to more than navigation, illustrating the flexibility of the region in adjusting response profiles in different contexts. However, it remains poorly understood under what conditions and at what time-scale changes in MEC coding occ

Current models of behavioral performance are based on a cost/benefit analysis that ignores the impact of intrinsic motivation. Here we conceive intrinsic / extrinsic motivation as being driven by the value of the action itself (e.g., learning good stuff) / the value of the action outcome (e.g., getting a good mark). We propose that, unlike extrinsically motivated actions (for which the reward is delayed), intrinsically motivated actions (for which the reward is concomitant) may not require the exertion of effortful cognitive control.We developed a test where participants memorize and retrieve