The decision to engage in lifelong learning often entails a motivational conflict, requiring individuals to balance potential benefits against the costs of engagement. Approach- avoidance motivation occurs when an action involves simultaneous positive and negative outcomes, necessitating a choice. This concept has primarily been studied in emotionally charged decisions linked to fear or anxiety, relevant for clinical settings. Our aim is to shift the focus to the cost of engagement in learning and educational settings. In a society marked by high demands and numerous tools for knowledge updating, lifelong learning may be beneficial for continuous individual development and societal contribution. We introduce a new framework that intricately connects motivation and learning processes with cognition, highlighting the pivotal roles of executive functions and decision-making processes. This article delves into the confluence of lifelong learning, cognitive conflict, and approach- avoidance motivation within the context of education and learning processes.

The coronavirus pandemic has escalated rates of anxiety in the general U.S. population. Understanding how factors associated with coronavirus anxiety at the start of the pandemic differed among populations hardest impacted by coronavirus anxiety is key to effectively remediating negatively associated health outcomes and to better understand how to address concerns of the public at the start of a global pandemic. This study was a secondary analysis of data from a cross-sectional online survey of 1165 Prolific users between 13 and 15 March 2020. Data were collected from a stratified sample of U.S. adults aged 20 or older and currently living in the United States. The sample was stratified for age, gender, and race. Coronavirus anxiety was assessed as the dependent variable, alongside three independent variables: coronavirus crisis perception, perceived economic risk of coronavirus, and general self-efficacy. Multiple linear regression assessed the associations between the independent variables and coronavirus anxiety. Interactions between independent variables and two sociodemographic variables (i.e., gender, race) were also explored. The models were adjusted for age, gender, race, education, employment, and income. The average age of participants was 45.6 ± 15.7. The majority (76%) identified as White, approximately half identified as female and reported obtaining a bachelor's degree or higher. Coronavirus crisis perception and perceived economic risk of coronavirus were positively associated with coronavirus anxiety (β = 0.46, 95% CI = 0.41, 1.00; β = 0.14, 95% CI = 0.09, 1.00, respectively). General self-efficacy was negatively associated with coronavirus anxiety (β = -0.15, 95% CI = -1.00, -0.11). Gender and race both moderated the association between coronavirus crisis perception and anxiety. Race moderated the association between perceived economic risk and coronavirus crisis perception. These results provide a foundation to further explore cognitive factors in subgroups disproportionately affected by anxiety during the pandemic.

Goldwater and Gentner (2015) showed that the sensitivity for causal structures can be promoted with an intervention combining explication of causal models and guided structural alignment of situations from disparate fields with the same underlying causal model. We extended this intervention with inference questions and combined it with a subsequent complex problem-solving (CPS) task, in order to investigate whether enhanced sensitivity for causal structures results in better performance in CPS. This study (N = 108) compares the CPS performance indicators knowledge acquisition and knowledge application among three experimental groups (intervention, intervention extended with inference questions, control group) and reveals the following results: 1) The effectiveness of the intervention in increasing the sensitivity for causal structures was replicated. 2) Sensitivity for causal structures and CPS performance indicators were significantly positively correlated. 3) There is no direct effect of the intervention on CPS performance, but an indirect-only effect via enhanced sensitivity.