Nikita Mehta
Thesis Title: Role of effort and fatigue in human decision-making.
Climate change is a global threat, and individuals must choose proenvironmental actions daily, like walking instead of driving, sorting their waste, and consuming sustainable food and energy. However, this requires people to exert more effort, and past research has suggested that we are effort misers (Hull, 1943; Chong et al., 2017; Lockwood et al., 2017). Using the pro-environmental effort task (Cutler et al., 2024), we aim to understand how neuromodulators like dopamine influence motivation to exert effort to earn rewards for the climate relative to oneself and another charitable cause.
Given fatigue’s impact on effort choices (Muller et al., 2021), does it also bias other decisions in general? Individuals decide whether to seek or avoid information based on its potential to guide actions, reduce uncertainty, or lead to a desirable affective state (Sharot & Sunstein, 2020). These decisions to seek or avoid different information can have diverse consequences; for instance, ignoring the results of a medical test can lead to delayed treatment. Fatigue, a state of exhaustion affecting motivation, shares common brain mechanisms with information-seeking, and few studies point to a potential influence of fatigue on this behaviour (Muller et al., 2021; Goh et al., 2021; Dai et al., 2020). However, there is no direct experimentally controlled evidence on whether changes in fatigue bias information-seeking decisions. In this project, we aim to understand whether momentary changes in induced fatigue impact people’s informationseeking decisions. If fatigue does affect these decisions, does it alter people’s sensitivity to uncertainty, or the valence of the information, or both? Using a novel experimental task, along with computational modelling and neuroimaging, I aim to understand the cognitive and neural processes involved in deciding to seek information when fatigued. If fatigue alters sensitivity to information, it may also be beneficial to understand whether it increases individuals' susceptibility to misinformation.
Biography:
Nikita is a 3.75-year ESRC-funded PhD student in the Motivation and Social Neuroscience (MSN) Lab, supervised by Prof. Matthew Apps at the Centre for Human Brain Health, University of Birmingham. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Mumbai and previously worked as a Junior Research Assistant at Monk Prayogshala, a nonprofit research institute in Mumbai. After moving to the UK, Nikita completed her MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, then joined the MSN Lab as a Research Assistant. Her research explores the computational and neural mechanisms behind fatigue and effort-based decision-making, with a particular focus on their influence on pro-environmental behaviours and the spread of misinformation.
Publications:
Kapoor, H., Gurjar, S., Mahadeshwar, H., Mehta, N., & Puthillam, A. (2023). Do you trust the rumors? Examining the determinants of health-related misinformation in India. Asian Journal of Social Psychology.
Mehta, N., Inamdar, V., Puthillam, A., Chunekar, S., Kapoor, H., Tagat, A., & Subramanyam, D. (2023). Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on STEM researchers in India. Wellcome Open Research, 7(157). M
ehta, N., & Kapoor, H. (2024). Validating Tools to Measure Life Skills Among Adolescents in India. Journal of Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
Public Engagement:
Interviewed by BBC Sounds (2022, “Is there a language of laughter?”)
Blog posts:
How Do We Decide to Leave a Social Interaction? (2024) Psychology Today.
Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the Indian STEM community. (2022) India Bioscience. Do we wear different thinking caps? (2021) Psychology Today.
Does culture shape our environmental attitudes? (2021) Psychology Today.
Laughing at different jokes: Humor across cultures. (2021) Psychology Today.
Psychology
University of Birmingham
2024 Cohort
Email:
Supervisory Team:
Prof. Matthew Apps
Dr Jo Cutler
Prof. Patricia Lockwood