Changing the Motivation for Mental Work with Temporal Interference Stimulation

Abstract Successful goal-directed behavior often requires the exertion of effortful control processes. The striatum is thought to play a key role in determining whether a goal is worth the required cognitive effort, but whether and how the striatum causally influences effort-based decisions in humans remains unclear. Here, we address this gap by employing transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS), a novel non-invasive brain stimulation technique capable of targeting deeper brain regions. We applied striatum-targeted tTIS to healthy participants performing an effort-based decision task during functional MRI scanning. Supporting the idea that the striatum encodes both the benefits and costs of actions, we found that, on the behavioral level, striatum-targeted tTIS increased the sensitivity to both reward magnitudes and effort costs. At the neural level, this was mirrored by stronger representations of effort demands in the striatum under stimulation as well as by enhanced functional coupling between the striatum and the anterior cingulate cortex, a region at the intersection of motivation and cognition. Together, our findings provide insights into the causal contributions of the striatum to trading-off rewards against effort costs, informing neural accounts of motivated cognition and suggesting novel neural interventions for the treatment of amotivation.