William Hopper

Position

I started PhD with Dr. Jean Daunizeau in September of 2016 in the Motivational Brain Behavior team at the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris, France. Funded by EURIP Graduate School, I am a student of Paris Descartes at the FIRE Doctoral School.

Project

What causes us to change our mind when pursuing a goal? Motivation for goal attainment generally comes from a reward associated with that goal: doing well in school to ensure a well-paid job or practicing French every day for the satisfaction and pride of being a fluent speaker. This reward could also be health-related such as committing to a course of pharmaceutical drug treatment to treat a mental disorder. However, reaching these goals is most likely effortful and rewards are typically delayed in time. In turn, people tend to change their mind when experiencing the effort that is required to reach their goals. This is the starting point for the definition of an elusive notion, namely: (trait) perseverance. 

The goal of my project is the continued development of a dual computational/experimental approach designed to tease apart the hidden determinants of perseverant behaviour.

Background

Having graduated from a BSc in Biochemisty in 2016, I shifted my academic focus towards neuroscience and enrolled in the dual masters' degree "Brain and Mind Sciences". During my first year of the course at UCL, London, I completed a project entitled 'Computational Psychiatry of Self-Esteem'. It was during the second year, which took place jointly between Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, that I started on the work that would form the basis of my thesis.