Motivational salience is a cognitive process and a form of attention that motivates or propels an individual's behavior towards or away from a particular object, perceived event or outcome. Motivational salience regulates the intensity of behaviors that facilitate the attainment of a particular goal, the amount of time and energy that an individual is willing to expend to attain a particular goal, and the amount of risk that an individual is willing to accept while working to attain a particular goal.) is the aversive form of motivational salience that causes avoidance behavior, and is associated with operant punishment, undesirable outcomes, and unpleasant stimuli.
Incentive salience
Incentive salience is a cognitive process that grants a "desire" or "want" attribute, which includes a motivational component to a rewarding stimulus. The "wanting" of incentive salience differs from "liking" in the sense that liking is the pleasure that is immediately gained from the acquisition or consumption of a rewarding stimulus;
Aversive salience
Aversive salience describes the motivation behind avoidance behavior towards a negative presenting stimulus developed through learning and memory recall. Avoidance behavior emerges when a once novel stimulus becomes associated to an undesirable outcome. In Pavlovian conditioning, developed by Ivan Pavlov, pairing of a neutral conditioned stimulus (such as a soft tone) with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (such as bitter flavors, loud tones, electric shocks) results in association of the once neutral stimulus with a negative outcome. The previously neutral stimulus elicits avoidance behavior upon future presentation.
Neural Responses in Formation of Aversive Salience
Neural circuity between areas of the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia encode aversive salience based on behavioral relevance rather than mere negative valance of the stimulus. Activation of distinct neural populations within the parabrachial nucleus can establish CTA.
Clinical significance
Addiction
The assignment of incentive salience to stimuli is dysregulated in addiction. During the development of an addiction, the repeated association of otherwise neutral and even non-rewarding stimuli with drug consumption triggers an associative learning process that causes these previously neutral stimuli to act as conditioned positive reinforcers of addictive drug use (i.e., these stimuli start to function as drug cues). In fact, if the incentive salience associated with drug-taking becomes pathologically amplified, the user may want the drug more and more while liking it less and less as tolerance develops to the drug's pleasurable effects. The reinforcing and motivational salience-promoting effects of amphetamine are mostly due to enhanced dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic pathway.
Dopaminergic Activity
Dopamine Response
Distinctive patterns in dopamine activity in response to external stimuli influence motivational behavior. Tonic dopamine refers to steady dopamine release from dopaminergic neurons at baseline conditions. Phasic dopamine include fast bursts of dopamine activity, represented by spikes in activation or inhibition from tonic levels, upon presentation of an external stimulus. External stimuli can include aversive and appetitive cues both eliciting distinct dopaminergic response patterns. Neural populations which activate to distinct cues show uniformity in activity pattern upon presentation of similar cues, such the same population of neurons that respond to an aversive cue respond similarly to another aversive cue.
Increased phasic dopaminergic activity influences motivational salience. An appetitive predicting stimulus and reward acquisition elicit the same patterns of activity. Suggesting reward predicting cues gain incentive salience. During an aversive stimulus, phasic increased dopaminergic firing is minimal, with a greater response in phasic inhibition and majority of neurons unresponsive. Suppressing dopamine effects through neuroleptics or lesions to areas in the dopamine pathway, suppressed motivational behavior seen through decreased participation to rewarding tasks.
Reward Prediction Error Hypothesis
thumb|368x368px|Illustration of the Reward Prediction Error Hypothesis. Dopaminergic firing patterns in response to rewards and reward-predicting cues.
The "Reward Prediction Error Hypothesis" developed by Neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz, associates dopamine response to reward expectation.