Once the child–person has acquired his or her stable self-preference
LIKEtask:i, adopting the goal orientation characteristic of his or her per-
sonality (a LEARNING goal or a PERFORMANCE goal), he or she begins
to practice the chosen activity. The practice eventually leads to a reflectively
conscious need or decision to pursue the activity in question. Enduring praxis
along these lines creates the specific interest. This construction must be medi-
ated by executives (which we omitted in the formula) because the six schemes
to be coordinated are generally symbolic and conceptually complex (i.e., are
generic, standing for categories or kinds of schemes). Thus Table 8.2 (and not
Table 8.1) has to be used in estimating theM-capacity demand of this mental
operation. With a maximalM-demand of six (six schemes to be coordinated),
specific interests might not emerge until 13 or 14 years of age. However, there
are learning shortcuts: The schemes #persistently and context (see formula
F#3) are in practice closely connected with NEED-PURSUING, at least
within facilitating situations; so they could be chunked–structured with
NEED-PURSUING when life circumstances give the opportunity. In this
case,M-demand of formula F#3 reduces from six to four, that is, the mental
capacity of 9–10-year-olds. Other similarly acquired schemes can be de-
scribed that reflect judgments of utility or personal importance instead of
specific interests. When all these schemes have been attained, the child should
be able to self-consciously differentiate between–among them (e.g., interest
versus utility schemes–situations). The age estimates that our analyses yield
are consistent with Eccles et al.’s (1998, p. 1040) conclusion that “children in
Grades 5 through 12 differentiate task value” and reach the distinction be-
tween interest, utility, and personal importance.
These theoretical results offer partial explanation of developmental ages
of acquisition found in the motivation literature; and suggest that subjects’
failure to activate sufficient mental-attentional capacity could cause inade-
quate motivational arousal and induce underdevelopment of motivational
schemes in children and adults’ cognitive repertoire. We currently are investi-
gating this idea by comparing performance under conditions that might in-
crease or decrease the person’s normal state of mental arousal. Our depend-
ent variable is the subject’s performance on a well-studied visuospatial
measure ofM-capacity, the Figural Intersections Task (FIT; Pascual-Leone
& Baillargeon, 1994; Pascual-Leone & Johnson, 2001; Pascual-Leone et al.,
2000). In a between-subjects experimental study (Aro, 2002) adults were
tested individually with the FIT under two conditions: (a) wearing earphones
that produced no sound, or (b) wearing earphones that allowed subjects to
hear an intermittent low (60 Hertz) tone that lasted about 2 seconds each time
with silent intervals of about 4 seconds. Based on pilot work and current
ideas about arousal and binding mechanisms of consciousness (e.g., Singer,
2001), we predicted that the tone would induce a higher state of attentional
arousal in subjects, thus increasing their mobilization ofM-capacity during
- AFFECT, SELF-MOTIVATION, AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 223