Tony (Toon) is currently doing their Master’s internship with the SENSe lab under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Harold Bekkering, and post-docs Lieke van Lieshout and Dr. Olympia Colizoli. In line with our interest in motivation research, they want to explore the neural underpinnings of intrinsic motivation and its relation to extrinsic motivation. Specifically, they’ll be looking into how the hotly debated undermining effect of rewards on motivation interact with the established positive effects of autonomy and self-directed learning in an fMRI experiment. During parts of the project, Tony is assisted by bachelor honours student Florian, whose sister-project investigates different behavioural manipulations of the same paradigm.

Tony completed a Bachelor in Liberal Arts and Sciences, with a focus in Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Life Science, at University College Roosevelt, an honours college of Utrecht University. Tony’s interested in just about everything, from musical theatre to history, and can often be found lost for hours on Wikipedia or YouTube’s edutainment channels. In addition to studyig, Tony is an active member of a theatre group, student choir, study association Dondrite, and several political organisations, striving to make them more inclusive wherever possible.