Stimulating the vestibular system decreases sensitivity to reward and motivation

What is it about?

We administered galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) to healthy individuals. GVS is a safe way to stimulate the vestibular system, inducing mild illusions of self-movement and visuo-vestibular mismatches. We reasoned that this altered interoceptive state could impact motivational assets, in light of its neural underpinnings and evolutionary association with states such as motion sickness and nausea. Indeed, participants were less likely to deploy efforts to achieve monetary rewards during an attentional task. Results show that human decision-making is guided by bodily states, and that visuo-vestibular uncoupling could be an important marker prompting to blunted responses to appetitive stimuli.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

There is growing interest around the somatic determinants of human decision-making. Here we show that a vestibular perturbation, and visuo-vestibular mismatches, may represent an important interoceptive signal guiding motivated behavior. A safe technique capable of decreasing sensitivity to reward may inform greatly cognitive models of motivation, but also help the management of clinical populations for which an aberrant sensitivity to short-term rewards has been described.

Perspectives