Introduction
We are largely unaware of our own motives. Mathias Pessiglione co-leads a team with Sébastien Bouret et and Jean Danizeau which seeks to understand how motivation works, in both the normal and pathological brain. They define motivation as a set of processes that assign values to potential situations so as to drive behavior.
Their research is closely related to the emerging field of neuroeconomics, which is focused on understanding value-based decision-making and on explaining deviations to rationality.
They wish to build a more comprehensive account of motivational processes, investigating not only valuation and choice but also belief attribution (how likely are the possible outcomes of our actions) and effort allocation (how much energy we would spend to attain a goal). More specifically, their aims are to better describe a) how the brain encodes values and beliefs, b) how values depend on parameters such as reward magnitude, probability, delay and cost, c) how values are affected by social contexts, d) how values are modified through learning and e) how values influence the brain systems (perceptual, cognitive and motor) that underpin behavioral performance.
Their long-term objective is to build a neuro-computational theory that would account for the determination of human behavior, and which would enable making sound predictions about the both clinical and economic outcomes.
Mathias Pessiglione’s team is focused on studying human motivation using principally two types of methods: neuroimaging (mainly fMRI in healthy subjects but also MEG and local field potentials in patients) and neuropsychology (testing behavioral deficits following brain damage and drug or surgical treatments). The general approach has consisted in building behavioral tests that target a specific motivational process, using functional neuroimaging to identify the underlying brain system, and then neuropsychology to assess how the targeted motivational process is affected when the identified brain system is dysfunctional in pathological conditions.
Projects :
To investigate motivational processes in humans, Mathias Pessiglione’s team :
- develops computerized behavioral tasks that target the process of interest
- uses neuroimaging techniques (functional MRI, EEG-MEG, local field potentials) to indentify the brain networks underlying task performance
- assesss deficits in task performance when the identified networks are affected by neurological or psychiatric disease and their treatment (medication and surgery)
They are currently interested in several pathological conditions where motivation is dysfunctional
- in neurology: Parkinson disease, Huntington disease, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, Alzheimer disease, fronto-temporal dementia, focal lesions (stroke, glioma)
- in psychiatry: major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia
Their current projects can be divided on the basis of the recorded behavioral measure:
1. Choice
Instrumental learning: how the brain learns the values of actions and tasks from success and failure
- Effort discounting: how the brain arbitrates between options that require different effort levels
- Time discounting: how the brain arbitrates between options with different delays of outcome delivery
2. Effort
- Effort management: how the brain decides when to expend energy over time
- Social determinants: how the brain integrates cooperation and competition situations into effort allocation
3. Rating
- Values: how the brain estimates the pleasantness of potential situations
- Beliefs: how the brain estimates the likelihood of potential situations
Interactions: how the brain value and belief systems interact with each other and with others (such as the mirror neuron system or the episodic memory system)
