Physiological Mechanism Study On Motivation

Motivation is the drive to stimulate and sustain of individual activities, it plays an important role in human's work, and very important in human progress and social development. High motivation can bring high efficiency. According to the purpose of action, the motivation of people can be divided into extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the performer. You do the tasks because someone else wants you to do or because of factors external to you (like money or good grades). Intrinsic motivation occurs when you are internally motivated to do something because it ether brings you pleasure. You do the tasks just because you want to do. Motivation plays the role of activate, point to the purpose and maintain on people's behavior activation. Compared to extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation can maintain people's activities for a longer term. Extrinsic motivation's maintain power may weakened for the external incentives' change. Intrinsic motivation more tends to people's interests, it does not change with the external environment. Many factors affect the motivation, including stereotype threat and difficulty sequence of the task, but there is little research focus on the impact of the tow on motivation. The currently study on the physiological mechanisms of motivation has focused on extrinsic motivation (like money), and little research focus on the different of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation's physiological mechanism. The study based on the research in the past, selected college students in the university as subjects, adopt the behavior and ERP ways to explore the stereotype threat's impact on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and the Neural mechanisms of motivation.Experiment 1 chose 60 minority college students from one national university as subjects, use image recognition tasks and situational motivation scale as the experimental material. Finding that stereotype threat led to extrinsic motivation increased, and the stronger extrinsic motivation result in performance score decline.The second experiment used event-related potential technology to study the intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation's electrophysiological mechanism. The level of intrinsic motivation is induced by task difficulty sequence, the extrinsic motivation level induced by the value of reward. Behavioral data found that task difficulty sequences were successfully induced the level of intrinsic motivation, both the high level of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation motivations' correct rate were significantly higher than low level. External rewards can improve subjects' performance. Whether the high level of motivation or the low level, monetary rewards significantly improved the correct rate, and significantly accelerated the reaction time. Electrophysiology data was found that regardless of motivation level, P3 peak was significantly higher under reward conditions than intrinsic conditions; the N2pc.peak was significantly lower under reward conditions than intrinsic conditions.