Giampiero Bardella
Emiliano Brunamonti
Suliann Ben Hamed
Fabio Di Bello- 1Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
- 2Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, CNRS, UMR5229, 69675 Bron Cedex, France
Editorial on the Research Topic
Integrating motivation and attention: behavioral and neural perspectives
Motivation refers to a range of urges aimed at meeting a variety of internal (e.g., physiological needs) and external (e.g., social appreciation) demands (Maslow, 1943). While motivation is known to influence cognition broadly, its direct role in the control of attention remains uncertain. For these reasons, understanding how motivational and attentional mechanisms interact to shape complex behavior represents one of the most intriguing topics in cognitive neuroscience. In this editorial, we feature a collection of recent articles addressing such interactions from complementary behavioral and neural perspectives. Together, they provide converging empirical evidence that motivational and attentional mechanisms are not separate regulatory processes. Instead, they appear deeply intertwined, jointly influencing and shaping the cognitive processes underlying goal-directed behaviors (Di Bello et al., 2019; Mogg et al., 2003).
An intriguing aspect about the neurophysiological correlates of this interaction emerges from the work of Narvaria et al. They elucidated how motivational relevance, acquired through repetition, shapes attentional control within visual working memory. By combining behavioral performance with EEG spectral analysis, the authors demonstrated that familiar stimuli, bearing implicit motivational salience from prior exposure, elicit desynchronization in the beta band, which can be associated with efficient retrieval. In contrast, novel items engage frontal theta and parietal alpha rhythms, reflecting sustained cognitive control. These neural signatures reveal how motivation from learned relevance and attention jointly optimizes memory operations. In addition, the findings advance experimental understanding by linking repetition-based facilitation to measurable oscillatory mechanisms. These mechanisms mediate the dynamic interaction of motivation and attention during mnemonic processing.
Another domain in which motivation-attention interference exerts a measurable effect is motivational learning and attentional automaticity guided by social and non-social cueing. In this Research Topic, Salera et al. contributed by investigating how experience-dependent motivational significance transforms transient orienting responses into stable, value-driven attentional habits. The authors demonstrated that only cues with motivational or affective significance, such as gaze direction, generate persistent attentional biases by systematically varying cue predictiveness across social and non-social signals. Habitual attention thus arises from the gradual internalization of motivational contingencies, where learned value guides perceptual priority independently of conscious intention. This idea is coherent with previous research (Chacón-Candia et al., 2023; Salera et al., 2024; Di Bello et al., 2025) showing how neural and behavioral evidence converge to suggest that attention becomes automatic when influenced by learned value, rather than solely by physical salience.
A strong relationship has also been proposed between spatial attention and motor action/inhibition. Haque et al. provided further insights through a non-predictive spatial cueing stop-signal task. They showed that initial exogenous cueing was not beneficial for action stopping. However, after this initial period, inhibition of return (IOR) emerges, decreasing response probability in valid vs. invalid trials. This temporally specific interaction suggests that attention operates as a gating mechanism for inhibitory processes depending on time-dependent motor and perceptual contingencies. This is in contrast with previous studies suggesting that cue predictiveness may play a key role in both preventing initial global stopping and enhancing perceptual processing of the stop signal (Haque et al., 2024; Di Bello et al., 2022). Overall, these findings deepen our understanding of motivation–attention coupling by showing that adaptive motor inhibition also depends on the temporal dynamics of salient stimulus presentation, operating beyond conscious strategic control (Padmala and Pessoa, 2010, Giuffrida et al., 2023).
In his study, Chang examines the relationship between motivation, imagination, and creativity in digital gaming, combining psychological analyses (SEM) with EEG measures. The EEG data reveal increased activity in brain regions associated with creative thinking and emotional processing, including the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, occipital lobes, and amygdala. The findings suggest that imagination mediates the relationship between motivation and creative performance, likely encouraging flexible exploration and attentional control during gameplay.
Although much remains to be understood about the mechanisms that govern the interaction between attention and motivation, the articles in this Research Topic reinforce the idea of a tight relationship between the two systems and highlight the potential of leveraging motivational cues to enhance cognitive performance, learning, and creativity in both experimental and applied contexts.
Author contributions
GB: Conceptualization, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. EB: Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. SB: Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. FD: Conceptualization, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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References
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Di Bello, F., Ben Hadj Hassen, S., Astrand, E., and Ben Hamed, S. (2022). Prefrontal control of proactive and reactive mechanisms of visual suppression. Cereb. Cortex 32, 2745–2761. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab378
Di Bello, F., Ceccarelli, F., Messinger, A., and Genovesio, A. (2025). Endogenous and exogenous attentional interplay through mixed prefrontal cortex resources. Curr. Biol. 35, 3825–3838.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.06.070
Di Bello, F., Giamundo, M., Brunamonti, E., Cirillo, R., and Ferraina, S. (2019). The puzzling relationship between attention and motivation: do motor biases matter? Neuroscience 406, 150–158. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.03.011
Giuffrida, V., Marc, I.B, Ramawat, S., Fontana, R., Fiori, L., Bardella, G., et al. (2023). Reward prospect affects strategic adjustments in stop signal task. Front. Psychol. 14:1125066. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1125066
Haque, M.d.T, Segreti, M., Giuffrida, V., Ferraina, S., Brunamonti, E., et al. (2024). Attentional spatial cueing of the stop-signal affects the ability to suppress behavioural responses. Exp. Brain Res. 242, 1429–1438. doi: 10.1007/s00221-024-06825-8
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Keywords: attention, motivation, goal directed behavior, cognitive control, working memory
Citation: Bardella G, Brunamonti E, Ben Hamed S and Di Bello F (2025) Editorial: Integrating motivation and attention: behavioral and neural perspectives. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 19:1729668. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1729668
Received: 21 October 2025; Accepted: 31 October 2025;
Published: 07 November 2025.
Edited and reviewed by: Lutz Jäncke, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Copyright © 2025 Bardella, Brunamonti, Ben Hamed and Di Bello. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Fabio Di Bello, ZmFiaW8uZGliZWxsb0B1bmlyb21hMS5pdA==; Giampiero Bardella, Z2lhbXBpZXJvLmJhcmRlbGxhQHVuaXJvbWExLml0