fluence the choice of activity. They constitute, as Oerter (2000) would say,
the basic frame of a person’s here-and-now motivation. Motives may be
strong and yet unclear about the objects (obs) that can satisfy them. For in-
stance, in inexperienced or naïve people, sex or even hunger (but only with
children from well-fed families) may be strong and yet leave the person con-
fused about a suitable object of desire. Experience is needed to discover that
pangs in the stomach and lack of mental focus are expression of hunger, or
that restlessness and the eyes’ attraction to the bodies of others are caused
by the sex motive. These discoveries (i.e., the learning or differentiation of
motive schemes) do bring interest to the objects in question.Specific inter-
ests, in contrast, are constructs–schemes ontogenetically derived from mo-
tives; they constitute the manifestation in human activity (and in the per-
son’s object representation, i.e., in the internalized obs) of more or less
enduring affective goals.
MOTIVATIONAL PROCESSES ARE NOT
JUST DUE TO SCHEMES: BRAIN RESOURCES,
OVERDETERMINATION, AND CONSTRUCTIVE
LEVELS OF PROCESSING
Information-carrying processes (i.e., schemes—knowledge, affects, or other
learned or innate substantive dispositions) are not sufficient to explain the
emergence of suitable intrinsic motivations. Our theoretical model must be
enriched with a consideration of brain resources and their control mecha-
nisms. Perhaps the least understood brain resources for the process analysis
of motivation are those that in their dialectical coordination lead to emer-
gence of what, after William James, we callmental attention(Pascual-Leone
& Baillargeon, 1994; Pascual-Leone et al., 2000).Mental attention appears as
a complex content-free (i.e., general-purpose) brain organization of capaci-
ties, a dialectical system constituted by four different sorts of resources,
which we consider main determinants of consciousness and its causal power.
One of these resources isM-capacity(one of the causal determinants of work-
ing memory—Pascual-Leone, 2000a). When mobilized (which gives the feel-
ing of mental effort) and applied–focused on chosen schemes,M-capacity
can hyperactivate them (i.e., maximally activate schemes, inducing synchro-
nized firing in their neuronal circuits—Singer, 1994, 2001). Another of these
resources is mental-attentionalinterruption, which actively inhibits (to a
controllable degree, we think) the schemes on which it applies (Case, 1992,
1998; Fuster, 1989; Pascual-Leone, 1987, 1989; Posner & DiGirolamo,
1998; Stuss, 1992). Human consciousness can change its current contents
because of these two mechanisms that modulate mental attention and pro-
duce the stream of consciousness (James, 1892/1961).
204 PASCUAL-LEONE AND JOHNSON