Jade Seguin

Current Position

I completed my PhD under the supervision of Mathias Pessiglione, funded by the École Doctorale Cerveau Cognition Comportement (ED3C) and the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM). 

Project
Why can some children spend hours absorbed in learning complex facts about dinosaurs, yet struggle to focus for a few minutes on a school lesson they find uninteresting? A common intuition is that performing tasks because they are interesting (intrinsic motivation) requires less effort than performing tasks because they are instrumental in obtaining some benefits (extrinsic motivation).

However, current models of effort allocation during task performance assume that, in both cases, individuals must recruit effortful cognitive control processes that monitor and adjust the behaviour to ensure that goals are reached. From this perspective, both types of motivation are similarly costly. In this work, we introduce an alternative different-cost model: only extrinsic motivation requires the extra exertion of effortful cognitive control to bridge the gap between the immediate action cost and the delayed reward delivery (given that the reward comes with the action in intrinsic motivation).

The model’s predictions were tested in three studies involving a total of 228 healthy controls and 89 clinical patients. Across these studies, we employed newly designed behavioural memory tasks. Neurophysiological evidence supported the predictions: although both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation similarly improved performance, pupillometry showed that only extrinsic motivation triggered pupil dilation, a marker of effortful cognitive control and fMRI results revealed that only extrinsic motivation increased activity in brain regions associated with cognitive control, in the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC). Lastly, in clinical populations with known impairments of the cognitive control system (aged healthy volunteers, patients with low-grade glioma, and patients undergoing a major depressive episode), the effects of extrinsic motivation were found reduced, whereas those of intrinsic motivation remained stable. These results suggest that the motivations are dissociable and that intrinsic motivation is a robust driver of performance that can remain efficient even when cognitive control is impaired.

Together, these findings suggest that performing under intrinsic motivation might reduce demands on cognitive control. Leveraging intrinsic motivation could therefore be an effective strategy in educational, work, and clinical settings to help prevent fatigue and design efficient interventions.

Background

I am a Normalienne student at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Ulm, where I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Biology and the Master 1 IMaLiS in Cellular Neuroscience. During this period, I conducted a six-month fMRI study on the neural circuits altered by fear renewal in people with PTSD, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, under the supervision of Edward Pace-Schott. I then completed the Dual Master in Brain and Mind Sciences, a two-year program. In the first year, I obtained a Master of Science (MSc) from the Queen Square Institute of Neurology at University College London (UCL), where I completed a six-month internship with Steve Kennerley investigating the Communication-Through-Coherence (CTC) theory in a reward-guided decision-making task. In the second year, I pursued my Master 2 between the Cogmaster (ENS Ulm) and the Bip Master (Sorbonne) and conducted a six-month internship with Mathias Pessiglione at the Brain Institute (ICM), which formed the basis of my thesis. 

Contact

You can reach to me at : jade.seguin@icm-institute.org