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.[1] 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.[1]
Motivational salience is composed of two component processes that are defined by their attractive or aversive effects on an individual's behavior relative to a particular stimulus: incentive salience and aversive salience.[1] Incentive salience is the attractive form of motivational salience that causes approach behavior, and is associated with operant reinforcement, desirable outcomes, and pleasurable stimuli.[2][3] Aversive salience (sometimes known as fearful salience[4]) is the aversive form of motivational salience that causes avoidance behavior, and is associated with operant punishment, undesirable outcomes, and unpleasant stimuli.[5]
Motivational salience regulates the strength of goal seeking, the amount of risk taken and the energy invested from mild to extreme. ... Motivation can be conceptually described as a continuum along which stimuli can either reinforce or punish responses to other stimuli. Behaviorally, stimuli that reinforce are called rewarding and those that punish aversive (Skinner, 1953). Reward and aversion describe the impact a stimulus has on behavior, and provided of motivational properties, thus able to induce attribution of motivational salience. ... Attribution of motivational salience is related to the salience of an UCS (Dallman et al., 2003; Pecina et al., 2006). Thus, the more salient an UCS the more likely a neutral (to-be-conditioned) stimulus will be associated with it through motivational salience attribution. Prior experience is a major determinant of the motivational impact of any given stimulus (Borsook et al., 2007) and emotional arousal induced by motivational stimuli increases the attention given to stimuli influencing both the initial perceptual encoding and the consolidation process (Anderson et al., 2006; McGaugh, 2006).
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