Talk by Davide Gheza (Ghent) "Reward and motivational processes during performance monitoring: a psychophysiological approach"

Affective Neuroscience and Psychophysiology  

Colloquium

 

Davide Gheza

(CapLab, University of Ghent)

 

29.10.2019 18:00 - 20:00 — GEMI, Room 1.134, Gosslerstr. 14, Goettingen

Reward and motivational processes during performance monitoring: a psychophysiological approach

 

Human behavior is strongly driven by the pursuit of rewards and the avoidance of associated effort. Accordingly, the trade-off between expected cost and benefit is regularly accounted by formal models of motivation. 

The electrophysiology of performance monitoring (PM) offers a window onto the timeresolved neurophysiological mechanisms of reward processing, cognitive control, and motivation. In the first part of this talk I will outline the functional significance of a number of electrophysiological signatures of PM. These include, among others, the Reward Positivity event-related component of the human electroencephalogram (EEG), closely associated to reward sensitivity, as well as oscillatory signals such as Frontal Midline Theta (FMT), this latter thought to reflect the need for cognitive control. In the second part, I will present two studies that tackled the integration of reward with effort information, with a focus on the modulation of reward-related EEG markers. Such integration appears to be crucial for cost/benefit computations, on which motivational processes rely. With the last study, I will propose how FMT activity elicited during reinforcement learning can reflect motivational impairments in Major Depression.