Coralie Samson (post-doc LAPPS). Motivation Beyond Pleasure: Insights from Perception, Decision-Making, and Habit Formation

According to psychological hedonism, individuals are ultimately motivated to maximize pleasure and
minimize pain. Yet, contemporary research shows that motivational processes can extend beyond
the pursuit of pleasure. This presentation discusses motivation as a multifaceted system sometimes
decoupled from pleasure, using perception, decision-making, and habit formation as illustrations of
the underlying mechanisms. We will discuss why equating motivation with pleasure is conceptually
limiting and will illustrate how motivated and hedonic processes can diverge. We will then discuss
how motivational processes shape perceptual judgments and contribute to the construction of
preference within decision-making contexts. Finally, we will extend this perspective to habit
formation, highlighting how repeated cue–response pairings can lead to the automatization of
behaviors and how virtual reality paradigms can help study the processes involved.