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Talk abstracts > Marieke van der Schaaf (Tilburg University)
Marieke van der Schaaf - Tilburg University
Thursday, June 1st Talk Session 2: How effort and fatigue affect decision-making 17h - 17h30 Immune-induced fatigue is associated with reduced mental effort expenditure while mental abilities preserved Everyone knows the feeling of being sick. Besides the physiological symptoms, you also feel fatigued and are less motivated to engage in effortful activities. These motivational changes occur both within the physical and mental domains, potentially due to inflammatory effects on brain monoamine functioning. Earlier work within the physical domain, showed that acute inflammation alters motivational prioritization. It selectively increased the weighting of effort-cost, but not reward-value in decisions on whether or not to engage in physical effortful activities, while physical abilities preserved (Draper et al, 2018). However, it is currently unclear whether a similar motivational framework accounts for mental fatigue and cognitive symptoms of acute sickness. Accordingly, we tested the effects of bacterial endotoxin E. coli lipopolysaccharide (LPS) on a mental cost-benefit decision making task, in which participants decided whether they wanted to perform arithmetic calculations of varying difficulty (3 levels: easy, medium, hard) in order to obtain rewards (3 levels: 5, 6 or 7 points). Results revealed that immune-induced fatigue is associated with reduced willingness to exert mental effort, and that these reductions depended on effort but not reward information, while mental performance was preserved. These results extend the motivational account of inflammation to the mental domain and suggest that inflammation may not necessarily affect domain-specific mental abilities, but rather affects domain-general effort-allocation processes. I will discuss these results with respect to their implications for understanding the role of inflammation in the development of fatigue and motivational symptoms in disease. Keywords: inflammation, fatigue, cost-benefit decision-making Affiliations:
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