Interim Director, Cognitive Science | Associate Professor, Cognitive Science - GIDP | Associate Professor, Evelyn F McKnight Brain Institute | Associate Professor, Cognitive Science | Member of the Graduate Faculty | Associate Professor, Psychology | Associate Professor, Neuroscience - GIDP
Research in my lab mixes theoretical and computational modeling, psychophysics, pupillometry, EEG and fMRI to probe the neuroscience of learning and decision making in humans. Of particular interest is how we decide between exploring for information and exploiting what we already know. For example, when dining at a favorite restaurant, do you explore and try a new item on the menu, or do you exploit and get the same dish as always? In recent work we have shown that humans use two distinct strategies for solving this “explore-exploit dilemma”: a directed strategy in which exploration is driven by information seeking, and a random strategy in which exploration is driven by chance through decision noise. Ongoing work in the lab is investigating the neural bases of these two strategies and how they change in mental illness and across the lifespan.