Position
Research Associate
Affiliation
Psychology
Keywords
Cognitive Neuroscience, Reinforcement Learning, Computational Psychiatry, Decision Making, Vision
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Prediction and Learning lab, led by principal investigator Dr. Rebecca Lawson.
My primary research interest is in reinforcement learning in uncertain environments, i.e., how people learn from positive and negative feedback under changeable conditions, and how this can be altered in disease and disorder. I use Bayesian computational methods to analyze participant responses in reinforcement learning tasks, combined with eye tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of concurrent brain activity, and pharmacology, to understand uncertainty processing in adults with autism and anxiety. I carried out my PhD research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the [Cognitive Psychology lab(https://www.vupsy.nl/) of Prof. Jan Theeuwes, where I investigated the computational and neural basis of reward influences on perception, using computational modelling, fMRI and pharmacological methods in both healthy adults and adults with Parkinson’s disease. I completed my honours BSc in Applied Physics at Dublin City University, Ireland. After working for several years as a financial IT consultant in RBS bank in London, I moved to Nijmegen, The Netherlands to complete my MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University. My MSc project was on brain representations of visual mental imagery at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, in Prof. Floris de Lange’s Predictive Brain lab.
