Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying motivated seeing

People tend to believe their perceptions are veridical representations of the world, but also commonly report perceiving what they want to see or hear, a phenomenon known as motivated perception. It remains unclear whether this phenomenon reflects an actual change in what people perceive or merely a bias in their responding. We manipulated the percept participants wanted to see as they performed a visual categorization task for reward. Even though the reward maximizing strategy was to perform the task accurately, this manipulation biased participants perceptual judgments. Motivation increased activity in voxels within visual cortex selective for the motivationally relevant category, indicating a bias in participants neural representation of the presented image. Using a drift diffusion model, we decomposed motivated seeing into response and perceptual components. Response bias was associated with anticipatory activity in the nucleus accumbens, whereas perceptual bias tracked category-selective neural activity. Our results highlight the role of the reward circuitry in biasing perceptual processes and provide a computational description of how the drive for reward can lead to inaccurate representations of the world.