Prof. Dr. Kou Murayama

Kou Murayama is a Professor for Educational Psychology at the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology. In 2020, he has been awarded with the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. He is also Co-Director of the LEAD Graduate School & Research Network.

Kou Murayama's research focuses on a number of overlapping questions about how motivation works in human functioning. With his broad and interdisciplinary background both in basic and applied (especially educational) sciences, his research program features a “multimethod approach”, combining a number of different perspectives, and methodologies (e.g., longitudinal modeling, behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, ecological momentary assessments, meta-analysis, educational intervention, computational/statistical simulation) to gain a comprehensive understanding of motivation. One of the central themes of his recent work is to understand how humans are autonomously motivated to seek and gain knowledge (motivational state often called “interest” or “intrinsic motivation”) and how we can apply this idea to educational settings.