Thomas Mangin, PhD

Post-doctoral position at Université de Montréal (UdeM)

Psychology and Sport Sciences

 

My current research focuses on three main areas.

The first area of focus concerns effort and the perception of effort. Effort is defined as the allocation of resources to accomplish or attempt to accomplish a task, while the perception of effort refers to the conscious awareness (the conscious sensation) of the engagement of these resources. When the difficulty of a task increases, an individual must allocate more resources to the task (i.e., exert more effort) if they wish to maintain their performance. In the presence of pain, the task becomes more difficult as pain monopolizes a portion of the attentional resources that would otherwise be allocated to the task. Consequently, if an individual wants to maintain their performance despite pain, they must engage more effort. The research I conduct in this domain has provided evidence supporting this hypothesis, both in cognitive and motor tasks. At the same time, since the attentional resources normally allocated to processing pain are redirected to the task, this leads to a reduction in the perception of pain stimuli—a phenomenon known as hypoalgesia. 

My second area of research focuses on cognitive fatigue and ego depletion. This work continues the research I conducted during my doctoral studies. More specifically, this research area interacts with the first. For instance, I aim to understand how cognitive fatigue influences the interaction between the perception of effort and the perception of pain. 

Finally, the third area of interest, which is currently predominantly theoretical, focuses on boredom. During my doctoral work, I demonstrated that boredom is a variable that increases cognitive fatigue and ego depletion. As such, the presence of boredom during the execution of a control task—intended to be compared to a task inducing cognitive fatigue—may obscure the effects of ego depletion. 

 

Finally, on a more occasional basis, I also take an interest in the philosophy of science, particularly as it pertains to psychology and the sciences of physical activity.

Epuisement du soi 

My previous research focused on the necessary conditions for observing the phenomenon of ego-depletion. Many studies in the literature have shown that after a mentally demanding task requiring self-control, participants had poorer performance in a subsequent task also requiring self-control. However, this phenomenon is heavily debated, both in terms of explanatory models and in terms of replicating the effect. My previous work has shown that certain conditions, such as duration, difficulty, but also the characteristics of the tasks, are necessary to control for observing the effect. In these studies, I was able to show that boredom is an important component of the decrease in performance and at least a partial explanation for the replication problems in this research field. I was able to show that after a mental task requiring control, the effort invested in the following task was increased in order to achieve equal performance. I was also able to show a link between the time-on-task effect (i.e., decrease in performance with time spent on a task) and the ego-depletion effect (i.e., decrease in performance in the subsequent task). This small effect size observed in the correlation indicates that other mechanisms are at work in reducing performance that can be observed in the literature on ego-depletion.

Cognitive Dissonance

Common sense suggests that preference is the source of choice, while the theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that choice can also create preference. The free choice paradigm indicates that after a difficult choice between two objects, we re-evaluate and modify the preference we have towards these items. The first part of this research will have been to apply statistical treatments adapted to a field with methodological and statistical gaps. A second part will have been to determine the moment when the change of preference occurs as well as the evaluation of its long-term maintenance. The results showed that for the chosen objects, the change occurs at the time of the choice. The results also indicate that the maintenance of the change in preference is only valid for the non-chosen objects.

To Psychology students

Social Psychology:

• • • • « Perceiving and explaining behaviors » ​​(BSc 2)
      • « Social influence » (BSc 1)

Cognitive Psychology:   

• • • • « Psychology and Games » (BSc 1)

Statistics:

• • • • ​« Advanced statistics applied to psychology ​» (BSc 3)

To Sport Sciences Students 

Cognitive Psychology:

• • • • « Psychology of stress and motivation » (BSc 2)
      • « Psychological determinents of behavior » (BSc 2)
      • « Psychopathology : roles of Executive functions » (BSc 3)
      • « Cognitive and pathologic Aging » (BSc 3)
      • ​« Normal cognitive aging and physical activities » (professionnal Bachelor)

Methodology of research (BSc 1)

To Sport Sciences Students in Canada

Statistic: 

• • • • « Methodology of research » (MSc 1)

Aging: 

• • • • « Aging and physical activities » (BSc 3)