I joined the lab as a PhD student, supervised by Prof. Etienne Koechlin. Due to my background in economics and finance, I got interested in human behavior and organically dived into a project studying value-guided human choice adaptation in uncertainty. We generalized a computational model independently mixing probability and value attributes of choice options to various decision contexts. By contrasting and probing the model against expected utility and prospect theories, we revealed that this independent mixing of attributes is a critical adaptive mechanism in humans.
The second project of my PhD thesis addressed whether and how decisions affect subsequent Bayesian-like inferential processes in perceptual uncertainty. We found that making evidence-based decisions leads to equalizing evidence across unchosen options, whereas switching to an unrelated task (i.e. decisions based on unrelated stimuli) triggers an increase in belief of the chosen option. These results confirm that selection not only reads out decision variables (the outputs of valuation processes), but also alters the decision variables that drive the selection.
After the PhD defence, as part of my postdoc research, I continue exploring computational foundations of selection-based belief distortions, furthermore, through model-based fMRI, I study the involvement of parietal and prefrontal cortices in belief distortions, specifically, how the neural organization of belief distortions differs between evidence-based selections and switching to unrelated tasks.
