Position Title
Associate Professor
Position Title
Associate Professor
- Department of Psychology
- Center for Mind and Brain
Bio
How do our brains make decisions? How do our brains learn from their outcomes? Our lab seeks mechanistic answers to such questions at the behavioral, computational, and neural systems levels. Our research is multi-disciplinary, lying at the intersection between Psychology, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Behavioral Economics.
We investigate how the human brain forms and tunes predictive models of the environment, and how it leverages these models to make decisions and perform inferences. The prediction problems we study span reward prediction (e.g. money, foods, etc.), social prediction (e.g. other people’s intentions, traits, etc.), and “state” prediction (e.g. perceptually signaled contexts, inferred latent contexts). Our lab uses combinations of behavioral, computational, neuroimaging, and intracranial recording techniques to investigate how the brain forms, updates, and leverages representations of the structure of a task or the environment to generalize and perform novel inferences. One current focus in the lab is how people abstract cognitive maps of relationships between entities or states in tasks (e.g. social networks, hierarchically related associations, hierarchical plans, etc.) to make efficient inferences, generalize to novel situations, and make flexible decisions.
Graduate group affiliations: