# Editorial: Integrating motivation and attention: behavioral and neural perspectives

Giampiero Bardella, Emiliano Brunamonti, Suliann Ben Hamed, Fabio Di Bello

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Giampiero Bardella, Emiliano Brunamonti, Suliann Ben Hamed, Fabio Di Bello. Editorial: Integrating motivation and attention: behavioral and neural perspectives. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2025, 19, pp.1729668. 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1729668. hal-05403557

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OPEN ACCESS

EDITED AND REVIEWED BY
Lutz Jäncke,
University of Zurich, Switzerland

*CORRESPONDENCE

Fabio Di Bello

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fabio.dibello@uniroma1.it

Giampiero Bardella

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giampiero.bardella@uniroma1.it

RECEIVED 21 October 2025

ACCEPTED 31 October 2025

PUBLISHED 07 November 2025

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

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.

# Editorial: Integrating motivation and attention: behavioral and neural perspectives

Giampiero Bardella¹*, Emiliano Brunamonti¹,
Suliann Ben Hamed² and Fabio Di Bello¹*

¹Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, ²Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, CNRS, UMR5229, 69675 Bron Cedex, France

KEYWORDS

attention, motivation, goal directed behavior, cognitive control, working memory

## 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

Chacón-Candia, J. A., Román-Caballero, R., Aranda-Martín, B., Casagrande, M., Lupiáñez, J., and Marotta, A. (2023). Are there quantitative differences between eye-gaze and arrow cues? A meta-analytic answer to the debate and a call for qualitative differences. *Neurosc. Biobehav. Rev.* 144:104993. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104993

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

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. *Psychol. Rev.* 50, 370–396.
doi: 10.1037/h0054346

Mogg, K., Bradley, B. P., Field, M., and De Houwer, J. (2003). Eye movements to smoking-related pictures in smokers: relationship between attentional biases and implicit and explicit measures of stimulus valence. *Addiction* 98, 825–836.
doi: 10.1046/j.1360-0443.2003.00392.x

Padmala, S., and Pessoa, L. (2010). Interactions between cognition and motivation during response inhibition. *Neuropsychologia* 48, 558–565.
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Salera, C., Yankouskaya, A., Gazzaneo, M. D., Bonavita, A., Pazzaglia, M., Guariglia, C., et al. (2024). Preserved learning of implicit regularities with predictive social cues in older adults. *Front. Psychiatry* 15:1470649. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1470649