Ruth Krebs - REMOTIVATE

Onderstaande beschrijving is in het Engels:

Ruth Krebs

Ruth Krebs was born in 1979 in Germany and obtained her PhD in Psychology on motivational processes in the human brain in 2009. Between 2009 and 2011, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Afterwards, she took on a postdoctoral fellowship at Ghent University, funded by the FWO. Since 2013, she is a lecturer at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, at Ghent University. Her research focuses on motivational processes in the human brain, and specifically, on how motivation influences cognitive functions, emotional processes, and long-term memories.

Contact: Ruth.Krebs@UGent.be

Publications: https://biblio.ugent.be/person/802000960336

Reward revisited: Towards a comprehensive understanding of motivational influences on human cognition (REMOTIVATE)

This project will investigate how extrinsic motivation guides human cognition and behavior. For a comprehensive understanding of motivational benefits in human cognition, it is essential to study motivation in relation to interrelated mediating factors, such as emotional components and automatic response tendencies. Moreover, the effects of motivation on cognition will be considered at different time scales - from immediate and intermediate to long-term influences. To illuminate the neural underpinnings of these relationships, behavioral paradigms will be combined with neuroimaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance tomography (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). As such, the current project aims to gain an overarching understanding of human motivation on the cognitive and neural level that will not only benefit basic psychology research but may also help to understand some of the neuropsychological disorders that have been associated with changes in the very same brain systems that give rise to the cognitive benefits of motivation.