Motivation | EPFL Graph Search

Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often held that different mental states compete with each other and that only the strongest state determines behavior. This means that we can be motivated to do something without actually doing it. The paradigmatic mental state providing motivation is desire. But various other states, such as beliefs about what one ought to do or intentions, may also provide motivation. Motivation is derived from the word 'motive', which denotes a person's needs, desires, wants, or urges. It is the process of motivating individuals to take action to achieve a goal. The psychological elements fueling people's behavior in the context of job goals might include a desire for money. Various competing theories have been proposed concerning the

Increasing motivation in robot-aided arm rehabilitation with competitive and cooperative gameplay

Urs Keller

Several strategies have been proposed to improve patient motivation and exercise intensity during robot-aided stroke rehabilitation. One relatively unexplored possibility is two-player gameplay, allowing subjects to compete or cooperate with each other to achieve a common goal. In order to explore the potential of such games, we designed a two-player game played using two ARMin arm rehabilitation robots.

BioMed Central2014

La modélisation des facteurs humains dans la gestion de projets

Roland Sauter

During the past years, project management has been rapidly spreading out into the various domains of human endeavor; project management is becoming the most promising form of management in a changing world. This development increased drastically the need for training programs for project managers, and the main challenge of those training programs is their behavioral aspect, the training of interpersonal skills. The aim of our work is to create a model of the human factors in project management, in order to build a training simulator which would integrate the technical expertise and the human factors. In order to establish a list of the relevant human factors in project management, we conducted a first survey among one hundred project managers. The findings of this first survey allowed us to work out a certain number of hypotheses, which were tested in a second survey on a larger sample of project managers (700). The construction of our model has been done with a precise goal: a training simulator – that's why we could simplify the problems in several ways, especially regarding the circular interactions of some variables in the model. The data gathered in the survey were used to determine the parameters of the model. The construction of such a model is the first specificity of our work. Then we developed a full-scale training simulator for project managers, and we implemented our model of the human factors in this simulator. The simulator is centered on the planing and execution phases of a project. A simple, easy-to-use interface allows the user to visualize the project status, to make adequate decisions and to see the effect of those decisions on the project and on the evolution of the human factors immediately. The integration of the technical tasks and the human factors into a simulator is the second specificity of our work. This simulator has been in use since the beginning of 1995, and 200 project managers have been trained since then. A survey was conducted among the trainees: it showed the high efficiency of this type of training in a virtual world, the very high motivation of the trainees and a high learning effect on the behavioral level.

EPFL1996

Two-photon calcium imaging of neocortical projection neurons in whisker somatosensory cortex during goal-directed sensorimotor learning

Dimitra Angeliki Vavladeli

Abstract Excitatory projection neurons of the neocortex are thought to play important roles in per-ceptual and cognitive functions of the brain by directly connecting diverse cortical and subcortical areas. However, many aspects of the anatomical and functional organization of these inter-areal connections are unknown. The mouse primary somatosensory whisk-er barrel cortex (S1) serves as an important model for investigating the mammalian neo-cortex, and, here, I firstly investigate the structure and secondly the function of a specific subset of S1 cortico-cortical long-range projection neurons. In the first part of my thesis, I studied long-range axonal projections of excitatory layer 2/3 neurons with cell bodies located in S1. As a population, these neurons densely projected to secondary whisker somatosensory cortex (S2) and primary/secondary whisker motor cortex (M1/2), with additional axon in the dysgranular zone surrounding the barrel field, perirhinal temporal association cortex and striatum. The execution of a goal-directed behavior requires the brain to process incoming sensory information from the environment in a context-, learning- and motivation-dependent manner in order to perform specific motor actions. Cortico-cortical communica-tion in the context of goal-directed sensorimotor transformation has begun to be studied, but little is known about how signaling between interconnected cortical areas is modified by sensorimotor learning, as well as in response to changes in reward contingencies. Hence, in the second part of my thesis, I studied cortico-cortical dynamics in primary whisker somatosensory barrel cortex (S1) of mice during a combined whisker and audito-ry task. Using transgenic mice expressing GCaMP6f combined with two-photon micros-copy and retrograde labeling techniques, I chronically monitored the activity of excitatory layer 2/3 neurons in S1 projecting to M1 or S2, while mice learned the behavioral switch task. The results demonstrated that both classes of neurons responded after whisker and auditory stimulation. However, the whisker stimulus evoked response was stronger than the auditory stimulus evoked response. Neurons projecting to S2 exhibited stronger re-sponses compared to neurons projecting to M1 neurons. Those responses remained rela-tively stable across training sessions and under different reward conditions. Furthermore, both classes of neurons responded during spontaneous licking, but neurons projecting to S2 had larger licking-related responses compared to neurons projecting to M1. This work therefore furthers our knowledge of the structure and function of specific types of cortical projection neurons, which is a necessary step towards detailed under-standing of how sensory information might be signaled from primary sensory areas to downstream brain regions for further processing.

EPFL2018