CNH Monthly Roundtable Talk (Sep) by A/Prof Trevor Chong

Talk details:

<Why bother? What effort tells us about motivated behaviour>

The willingness to invest effort is fundamental to daily behaviour - be it deciding whether to engage in your daily exercise routine, or how much effort to put in to work on a given day. Importantly, the investment of effort typically comes at the cost of fatigue, which may in turn affect future behaviour. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in understanding how individuals trade-off effort in return for reward. In particular, I will present a recent computational account of how fatigue dynamically influences the motivation to invest effort from moment-to-moment. Such frameworks allow us to address important questions about the relationship of motivated behaviour to traits such as apathy and fatigue, and may lead to greater insights into the motivational impairments seen across a wide range neurological and psychiatric conditions.

Speaker bio:

A/Prof Trevor Chong is a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist currently appointed as an ARC Future Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University. He leads the Cognitive Neurology Laboratory, which aims to understand the neural basis of motivated behaviour. He is Deputy Director of the Ageing and Neurodegeneration Theme at the Turner, and is President-Elect of the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society. In his clinical capacity, he consults as a cognitive neurologist at St Vincent’s Hospital and Alfred Health, and plays leading roles in several translational initiatives, including as Chair of the Dementia Committee of the STAREE clinical trial, and as Chair of Research at the FightMND Foundation.