In the past years, I started to apply insights from my work on the neural underpinnings of motivation (which was the core focus of my ERC starting grant which ended several years ago) and cognitive effort (which was the focus of a GOA project that is running out soon) to behavior change. Specifically, I am interested in the role of cognitive effort in mediating pro-environmental behavior. To this end we are employing behavioral experiments as well as online surveys. In the future we will compliment this approach with ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to increase external validity. At this point I have one PhD student that works on the topic on her own funding, and one PhD student will be hired on an FWO project in the fall. The main purpose of the basic funding I am applying for now will be to support another PhD student with a start-up funding of 11 months in which they will write a project proposal to support their full PhD. In this particular project we will explore cultural differences in motivation for pro-environmental behavior. I believe that the basic funding is a great opportunity for our lab, which is fairly small at the moment.