Our study, together with the ones cited above and several others, illustrates attempts at understanding how motivation influences cognitive and sensory processes. More generally, what are the neural bases for these effects? At the outset, it is instructive to consider the relationship between motivation and cognition more abstractly. For concreteness, we can consider attention as the cognitive task. We know that attention affects behavior, and one possibility is that motivation has similar effects that take place independently of attention (Figure 3A). A second scenario would suggest that motivation affects behavior by engaging the same set of processes that are used by attention. In this case, the impact of motivation on behavior could be described as mediated by attention (Figure 3B). This mediation could be partial only, such that both direct (motivation → behavior) and indirect (via attention) effects take place. Finally, it is possible to imagine situations in which attention and motivation are more highly interactive, such that they jointly influence behavior (Figure 3C). In this latter case, although one may choose to describe certain processes as “attentional” and others as “motivational”, the interactions between the systems are sufficiently high, and their strict separation is possibly more semantic than real.