MSc/PhD/postdocs

My lab – Psychiatry in Action – is looking for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to lead a project looking at how people perceive effort. Although significant progress has been made in understanding motivation, a critical yet understudied aspect of human motivation is how we perceive and respond to effort: when we feel motivated to do something or ‘up for it’, we can perform the hardest of tasks, but when not, even the most mundane task feels extremely difficult. Changes in how people perceive effort are common across individuals as a result of neuropsychiatric conditions and within individuals as a function of sleep, mood and so forth. What underlies these changes remain largely unclear. To better understand the determinants of effort perception, the project will use various neurophysiological measures in humans, including EEG, pupillometry and metabolic measures in tasks requiring physical and/or cognitive effort.