Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience: Mechanisms of Motivation-Cognition Interactions
Editor-in-Chief: Deanna Barch
Special Guest Editor: Todd Braver
In the last decade, investigations of motivation have been revitalized by progress in social, affective, and cognitive psychology, as well as by progress in systems and computational neuroscience, that begin to elaborate the mechanisms by which motivation influences higher-level learning and information processing. Exciting investigations of motivational effects have now been carried out in a number of domains including attention, working memory, episodic memory, executive control, decision-making, and implicit goal formation. Importantly, this recent work has provided new theoretical frameworks, methodologies and analytical tools for characterizing the nature of motivation-cognition interactions. These range from experimental paradigms that provide more precise behavioral and cognitive assays, to neuroimaging methods enabling identification of neural activity dynamics in both localized regions and large-scale brain networks, to computational approaches that provide formalisms for understanding reinforcement learning and decision-making. Additionally, new work has addressed questions of how developmental, aging, and clinical populations are impacted by changes in the nature of motivation-cognition interactions.
This special issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience will bring together a comprehensive set of articles identifying and addressing the mechanisms by which motivation interacts with cognitive and affective function. Consistent with the journal mission, submissions should provide a neuroscience-based perspective, with a particularly high priority placed on work that integrates across psychological and neurobiological levels of analysis.
Submissions may target any issues related to motivation-cognition interactions, including those that may overlap with topics within affective function, reward processing, or reinforcement learning. However, for these latter topics, it will be important to make clear how invoking the construct of motivation provides added theoretical and/or experimental leverage to the question of interest. We particularly encourage submissions that include a lifespan or aging perspective. Both original empirical articles and review/opinion pieces are welcomed.
One-page proposals are due July 1, 2013, and full manuscripts will be due October 1, 2013, with the goal of publishing the Special Issue in March of 2014. Please send the one-page proposal to Deanna Barch at dbarch@wustl.edu.
