ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Day-to-day fluctuations in motivation drive effort-based decision-making.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Time-of-day variation in motivation for everyday behaviors: A cluster-based approach to understanding individual differences.iScience · 2026Article
- Drops in confidence precede symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Obesity is associated with greater variability of reward signals in the nucleus accumbens.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- cpm: A python library for theory-driven modelling in computational psychiatry.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Environmental uncertainty shapes human effort learning.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- The social dimension of apathy: evidence for a distinct domain from 11,243 individuals across health and neurocognitive disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Cognitive modeling of real-world behavior for understanding mental health.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- TTTday window: Intra-week work stress in financial employees' cardiovascular biomarker trajectories.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Fronto-motor circuits linked to effort-based decision-making and apathy in healthy subjects.Communications biology · 2025Article
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Internal states like motivation fluctuate substantially over time. However, studies of the neurocomputational mechanims of motivated behavior have failed to capture this. Here, we examined how naturalistic ups and downs in state motivation influence the subjective value of reward and effort. In a microlongitudinal design (N = 155, state timepoints = 3,344, decision-making tasks = 845), we captured fluctuations in state and effort-based decision-making using smartphone-based momentary assessments as people went about their daily lives. We found that both state and trait have independent and multiplicative effects on decision-making. State-behavior coupling was particularly pronounced in individuals with higher trait apathy, meaning that their choices were even more state dependent. Using computational modeling, we demonstrate that state motivation prospectively boosted reward sensitivity, making people more willing to exert effort in future. Our results show that day-to-day fluctuations in state and cognition are tightly linked and critical for understanding fundamental human behaviors and mental ill-health.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.