The Frontopolar Cortex Contributes to Motivating Cognitive Effort Exertion during Adaptive Decision-Making

When given a task involving different rewards, humans tend to maximize gains while minimizing costs. This strategic regulation of behavior is often modeled through cost–benefit trade-offs, in which the costs associated with effort exertion are weighted against the subjective value of the potential rewards (Shenhav et al., 2017). While the costs of cognitive effort have been extensively investigated, the neural mechanisms that enable its exertion remain unclear. Nevertheless, a growing neuroimaging literature links effortful behavior to a broad set of prefrontal and medial frontal areas, including the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC), the anterior insula (AI), and the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC). These regions are thought to contribute to multiple stages of effort computations, such as processing of task demands, reward rates, and interoceptive signals (Shenhav et al., 2017). The frontopolar cortex (FPC), which comprises more rostral sites of the frontal lobes, is functionally connected to areas commonly implicated in effort processing (e.g., aMCC, lPFC, vmPFC); it contributes to goal-directed behavior by reallocating cognitive resources in favor of the exploration and the pursuit of alternative rewards (Mansouri et al., 2017). Recent evidence indicates that cognitive and physical effort computations may share similar neural mechanisms involving the FPC (Soutschek et al., 2018). Effort-based discounting paradigms have led to important insights into cortico-cortical dynamics of cost–benefit computations across cognitive (Westbrook et al., 2019) and physical (Soutschek et al., 2018) domains. However, they provide low ecological validity due to delayed effort manipulations. In a recent article published in The Journal of Neuroscience , Bogdanov et al. (2025) sought to address the limited ecological validity of effort-based discounting paradigms to extend FPC's role in motivating effortful behavior to serial decisions. Specifically, they tested the hypothesis that excitatory tDCS to the right FPC may increase participants’ willingness to exert … Correspondence should be addressed to Luca Bovolon at luca.bovolon{at}phd.unich.it.