Topic: motivation

This CHEMCONTROL postdoctoral project studies human motivation, value-based decisions and cognitive control through experimental design, intracranial recordings, single-neuron and local-field-potential analyses, and computational behavioural models. The researcher joins Roshan Cools’s group at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging and collaborates with Florian Mormann’s group in Bonn for intracranial data collection and analysis. Employment is through Radboudumc Psychiatry in the Netherlands. The appointment is 32–36 hours weekly for one year, with a prospect of extension.

The meeting links amygdala-centered neural activity to emotional and internal states across molecules, cells, circuits, brain-wide networks and human neuroscience. Themes include motivation, reward, social behavior, threat, learning, memory, decision making, stress, addiction, pain and psychiatric disease. Basic, computational, translational and clinical researchers will discuss technologies for measuring, mapping, modelling and manipulating these mechanisms. Talks, poster sessions and discussion focus on emerging and unpublished research. Applicants need a science or engineering bachelor’s de

Andrew Huberman joins Patrick O’Shaughnessy to discuss the frontier of neurotechnology and sustained human performance. Their conversation considers the convergence of AI and biotechnology, gene-based methods for changing neural activity and motivation, and the relationships between visual behaviour, arousal and sleep. Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University.

The Meletis laboratory in Neuroscience offers a postdoctoral scholarship in Solna to study neuron subtypes and circuits underlying motivation and decision-making, including mouse models of stress and mood disorders. Work combines genetic and viral labelling, in vivo imaging or optogenetics, and freely moving or head-fixed behavioural experiments in circuits such as the basal ganglia, hypothalamus and dopamine system. Single-cell profiles and connectivity maps support the research. Apply through Varbi by 13 October 2026 with a CV, publication list and one-page research summary.

Masud Husain explains the neuroscience of motivation, dopamine, effort, and reward, together with research on apathy, dementia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and cognitive resilience.

Andrew Huberman explains how key neuromodulators shape motivation, energy, focus and mood, with science-supported behavioral, nutritional and supplement strategies.

This talk aims to answer these questions along four dimensions. First is history. RL was the basis of AI long before the term AI was introduced in 1956. The first machine learning (ML) systems were based on RL even before digital computers existed. Despite notable early successes of ML based on RL, RL essentially disappeared from ML until relatively recently. A second reason for renewed interest in RL is the clarification of some misunderstandings that have been prevalent in the ML community. A third, and most important, reason for this resurgence is that new, or rediscovered, algorithms and

Ann Kennedy discusses theoretical approaches to subcortical circuits that support survival, motivation, threat responses and pain. Topics include neural heterogeneity, protein-related timescales, nervous-system evolution and the limits of focusing exclusively on spikes and cortex. She also describes efforts to make automated behavioural labels consistent across experiments.

How and why are analogies spontaneously generated? Despite the prominence of analogy in learning and reasoning, there is little research on whether and how analogy is spontaneously generated in everyday settings. Here we fill this gap by gathering parents' answers to children's real questions, and examining analogy use in parental explanations. Study 1 found that parents used analogy spontaneously in their explanations, despite no prompt nor mention of analogy in the instruction. Study 2 found that these analogical explanations were rated highly by parents, schoolteachers, and university stude

The human brain faces a variety of computational dilemmas, including the flexibility/stability, the speed/accuracy and the labor/leisure tradeoff. I will argue that striatal dopamine is particularly well suited to dynamically regulate these computational tradeoffs depending on constantly changing task demands. This working hypothesis is grounded in evidence from recent studies on learning, motivation and cognitive control in human volunteers, using chemical PET, psychopharmacology, and/or fMRI. These studies also begin to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the huge variability in catecholamin

From a workout at the gym to helping a colleague with their work, everyday we make decisions about whether we are willing to exert effort to obtain some sort of benefit. Increases in how effortful actions and cognitive processes are perceived to be has been linked to clinically severe impairments to motivation, such as apathy and fatigue, across many neurological and psychiatric conditions. However, the vast majority of neuroscience research has focused on understanding the benefits for acting, the rewards, and not on the effort required. As a result, the computational and neural mechanisms un

When presented with identical task conditions across multiple trials, the brain produces variable patterns of neural activity. This neural variability stems from many sources, one of which is fluctuations in internal states (e.g., arousal, attention, and motivation). Neural variability may reflect changes in these internal cognitive factors and can influence our perceptual and decision-making abilities. For instance, when tasked with shooting consecutive free throws on a basketball court, we may experience changes in our arousal, and our minds might wander. Such trial-to-trial variability can

Interpretation of interval timing data generated from animal models is complicated by ostensible motivational effects which arise from the delay-to-reward imposed by interval timing tasks, as well as overlap between timed and non-timed responses. These factors become increasingly prevalent at longer intervals. To address these concerns, two adjustments to long interval timing tasks are proposed. First, subjects should be afforded with reinforced non-timing behaviors concurrent with timing. Second, subjects should initiate the onset of timed stimuli. Under these conditions, interference by extr

Research on analogical processing and reasoning has provided strong evidence that the use of adequate educational analogies has strong and positive effects on the learning of mathematics. In this talk I will show some experimental results suggesting that analogies based on spatial representations might be particularly effective to improve mathematics learning. Since fostering mathematics learning also involves addressing psychosocial factors such as the development of mathematical anxiety, providing social incentives to learn, and fostering engagement and motivation, I will argue that one area

Ernst Fehr uses experimental evidence to examine the psychological consequences of authority in economic interactions. Although power pervades political, social and economic life, its motivational origins and effects are not fully understood. The lecture investigates why people want to exercise authority, how possessing it can strengthen motivation, and how being deprived of it can undermine motivation. These findings connect the allocation of decision-making power with incentives, cooperation and behaviour inside organisations.

The mesolimbic dopamine system is believed to regulate both reinforcement learning and motivation to obtain rewards. A central question is how the mesolimbic dopamine system influences these distinct functions. A classical neural circuit model proposes a two-component system in which dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core encodes prediction error signals to regulate reinforcement learning while dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens shell signals incentive salience and promotes motivated responses. Here we record bulk calcium dynamics in projection-specific ventral tegmental area (V

The dopaminergic system facilitates associative learning and motivation by signaling reward expectation and positive or negative valence in selected brain regions. Previous studies measuring somatic and axonal activity suggest a heterogeneous representation of reinforcement signaling by dopaminergic neurons, but it remains unclear how dopamine signals for expectation and valence interact in various brain regions. Here, we used an improved fluorescent dopamine sensor to record dopamine signals associated with reward predictions and valence in eight distinct striatal and non-striatal regions. We

Obesity has emerged as a prominent global health concern in recent times, a phenomenon often attributed to the excessive consumption of highly palatable, calorie-rich foods laden with sugar and fat. These diets can modulate certain neural pathways, such as the mesolimbic dopaminergic system of reward, but their potential addictive properties are still unknown although its effects have been widely studied. Additionally, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of cannabis sativa, has been found to have an important orexigenic role and modulating properties over the reward

Antidepressant drugs are beneficial for many of the symptoms of depression, but impairments in reward and motivation often remain or become worse. The effort-based foraging (EBF) and the effort-for-reward (EfR) tasks target different aspects of reward processing and motivation. This study investigated the effects of different antidepressants on effort-related decision-making (EfR) and motivation to engage with natural foraging (EBF). 2 cohorts of 16 and 24 C57bl/6J male mice were used in fully randomised, counterbalanced within-subject designs for acute pharmacological studies (escitalopram, v

In our previous study, we conducted a rescue behavior experiment. In this experiment, mice were trained to rescue a distressed familiar conspecific of the same sex by opening a door under two conditions: when the trapped mouse was in a dry or flooded chamber. We demonstrated that mice exhibit rescue behavior towards a distressed conspecific. Additionally, we discovered that inhibiting the dorsal hippocampus impairs this behavior. However, several questions regarding the specific components of impaired behavior remain. Does the emotional arousal of potential helpers increase when witnessing a d

Striatal dopamine (DA) is critical to the regulation of action selection and motivation. DA neurons have extensively branched axons which afford axonal regulation of DA release by diverse striatal neuromodulators including acetylcholine (ACh), GABA and adenosine, which regulate the amplitude and activity-sensitivity of DA release. Adrenoceptors are expressed throughout the striatum but their role, and that of norepinephrine (NE) as a potential striatal neuromodulator, is poorly understood. Given only a sparse norepinephrinergic input of the striatum but the dense innervation by DA, the endogen

In an ever-changing environment, flexible control of behaviour is crucial for survival. Across species, adaptive processes like attention and motivation manifest as flexibly fluctuating, brain-wide states. Although these states likely share commonalities across species, classical tasks are highly species-specific, preventing direct cross-species comparisons.Here we examine naturalistic fluctuations of attention across three species—mice, monkeys, and humans—completing the same highly immersive virtual reality (VR) foraging task (Fig.1A). This allows us to continuously track behavioural decisio

The research is based on the question "Why does the physically existing and physically functioning brain "paradoxically" process information biologically or socially expediently?" After all, we know that not a single physical law is "prone" to this. The short answer to this question is as follows: it happens because certain structures of the limbic region of the brain realize the ability of living beings to subjectively evaluate the biological/social value of world’s objects and phenomena, as well as the results and ways of information processing that occur in the brain. However, if so, we sho

The ventral midbrain (VM), which contains dopaminergic neurons, plays a role in motivation and learning. Our recent study showed that VM pre-movement activity is associated with subsequent peak grip force under incentive motivations. On the other hand, electrical stimulation on the VM in anesthetized monkeys induced muscle activity. These findings raise the question of whether the association between VM activity and peak grip force is independent of external rewards. To investigate this question, we measured the VM activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Thirty healthy volunteers