I am interested in how the basal ganglia subserve motivation in humans. Based on Robinson & Berridge's groundbreaking work in animals, I have developed a novel behavioral task that attempts to parse motivation into two important components. These are incentive motivation, i.e, the vigor and persistence of goal-directed behavior ('WANTING') and hedonic evaluation, i.e., experience of pleasure ('LIKING'). I am using this task to evaluate motivational changes in depression, that have been linked to basal ganglia dysfunction. I am also interested in the effect of age of onset of depression: people who develop depression late in life report more apathy than people with depression since adolescence. In the future, I would like to investigate:

1. the neural areas recruited when performing my task, using fMRI
2. the effect of dopaminergic medication on task performance in depression.

Recent publications