When individuals feel sad, they do not perceive the world in the same way as when they are happy. People's perception of the world and the passage of time are modulated by their emotional state due to its effect on muscle tension and physiological arousal.

In my work, I adopt the embodied approach of cognitive psychology to better understand how attitudes towards effort are associated with affective responses (liking or disliking) and modulate the intention to act. The protocols are derived from experimental psychology. We use equipment for quantifying human behavior: 3D cameras, pupillometry, physiological sensors, brain imaging, and movement kinetics. This approach allows us to model the effects of augmented environments on human reactions. Thus, we can determine the sensory principles that create the illusion of fluctuating time to evoke the taste of effort.

Smells are used to influence attentional dynamics and bodily and brain arousal states. The ultimate goal is to find the ideal fragrant dosage to promote the emergence of pleasure during effort.

WP 1: A palette of Smells. The smell of freshly baked bread makes me get up and walk much more than my doctor, who advises me to take 10,000 steps a day... Experimental methods are used to select scent palettes based on the levels of arousal, tension, and valence (negative or positive) they induce. We test the stability of feelings when scents are released in humid and variable temperature environments.

WP 2: Posture and 3D Kinematics. Experimentally testing the predictive coding of emotional motor behaviors is challenging when applying classical psychological paradigms. Indeed, measuring reaction times, eye movements, or body posture independently is insufficient to model a person's emotional experience. Questionnaires alone cannot objectify an emotional experience. Innovation is thus necessary. The paradigm shift I propose is one offered by cognitive sciences that apply clustering tools and deep learning models to behavioral and brain data.

WP 3: Brain Imaging with fNIRS Technology. People are capable of spontaneously modifying the rhythm of their actions to interact with their environment and others. This ability is underpinned by high-level cognitive functions, but little is known about the brain areas and efforts involved in this temporal control. An important issue is that current neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG, fMRI) are highly sensitive to motion, making it difficult to study brain activity in the context of whole-body motor paradigms. We are developing the use of continuous-wave fNIRS systems to record prefrontal and motor hemodynamic responses to account for contrasting brain activities when healthy adults perform motor or cognitive tasks of varying complexity and at different rates.