Nicolas Clairis

Position

Former Ph.D. student supervised by Mathias Pessiglione, currently working as a postdoc in Carmen Sandi's lab in Lausanne, Switzerland.

PhD Project

One of the goals of our team is to understand the neural mechanisms underlying motivation in the normal and diseased brain. We regard motivation as a series of processes that drive behavior to maximize benefits in outcomes (obtain reward and avoid punishment) and minimize costs in actions (effort and delay). To investigate motivation, we have developed a battery of tests that are used in various clinical populations (fronto-temporal dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, anterior communicating artery aneurysm, schizophrenia, depression). The ambition is now to build a neuro-computational model that would allow inferring neural dysfunction from observed behavior. To this aim I am currently conducting fMRI studies on healthy participants and recording intra-EEG data of epileptic and OCD patients performing the same tasks. Nicolas Borderies is simultaneously doing the same task with fronto-temporal and anterior communicating artery aneurysm patients.

Email: nicolas.clairis at epfl.ch