Cognitive Rewards: Mechanisms, Development & Well-Being

Cognitive activities (e.g., reading, solving puzzles) are often pleasurable. This hedonic response is crucial for motivating education, innovation, and enhancing well-being. What makes cognition intrinsically rewarding? What happens when this association breaks? Preliminary studies suggest that mental health is linked to ‘cognitive reward’ sensitivity more than to primary or secondary rewards. Yet, despite an extensive neuroscientific literature devoted to the latter, the concept of cognitive rewards has received limited attention. Our proposed research will alter this status quo. It will provide a new theoretical and empirical basis for understanding why, when, and how cognition becomes rewarding. We will bring together scientists studying human adults, children, monkeys and artificial agents. Using different techniques, but overlapping tasks, we will identify core features, developmental trajectories and neural fingerprints of cognitive rewards. We will examine whether individual differences in sensitivity to cognitive rewards is related to well-being and how such sensitivity changes with environmental statistics and development. The new knowledge, tools and tasks will trigger innovative research in neuroscience, psychology, and computer science. The findings will inform the design of curious artificial agents, the creation of educational programs that consider cognitive features children find rewarding, and mental health treatments that target cognitive rewards.