People
Members
Arghavan Aslani
I recently received a Bachelor’s degree from Tehran University’s College of Electrical and Computer Engineering. During my studies, I participated in a variety of clubs ranging from robotics to cognitive science and even performing arts. I created a robot in ESLAB to automate the process of drawing and printing on large surfaces. During my bachelor project, I began collaborating with Crowd Cognition Lab, which has continued to this day. I’m a research assistant working on aesthetic cognitivism for groups and I am currently developing software to track live eye gaze coordinates on artworks.
Sepehr Saeedpour
Moozhan Shakeri
Jamal (Jimmy) Esmaily
Jimmy did his studies in Computer Engineering (BSc) and Artificial Intelligence (MSc) in Iran where he worked as a researcher at IPM, Tehran. Since Sept 2021, he has moved to Munich to do his Ph.D. at LMU.
Jimmy describes his research as follows: “My research is focused on social/isolated decision making and learning. Specifically, I try to investigate the neuro-computational mechanism of the communication of uncertainty under collective decision making. I am also working on Eye-tracking and EEG data alongside computational models. Moreover, I am interested in how decisions could be learned. I try to explain learning and decision making processes in a single computational framework.“
Dardo Ferreiro
I am interested in how we perceive our environment, interpret, and act upon it. From the early stages of perception, through decision making, to prediction of outcomes. Through a joint appointment in the biology and psychology departments at LMU I am able to study both the neural coding of auditory/visual stimuli in animals and crowd cognition in humans. I am particularly excited about how individual and group interactions can improve the performance of decision making and event forecasting.
Marwa El Zein
Marwa El Zein is a research fellow working on collective decision-making at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. After an undergraduate degree in biology and a master degree in cognitive sciences in Paris, she completed her Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) on the neural mechanisms of contextual influences during perceptual decisions on facial emotions.
Research:
My research investigates how and why humans engage in collective decisions and aims to characterize the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying collective decisions. I test the idea that humans join groups to share responsibility for decision outcomes, thereby minimizing regret, punishment and stress in negative circumstances. More generally, my research interests fall within the field of social cognition and through my work, I wish to achieve a good understanding of social behaviours and their underlying neural mechanisms.
Jurgis Karpus
I recently completed my PhD in philosophy at King’s College London and am currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Cognition, Values, Behaviour research group at LMU-Munich.
Research:
My research lies at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and psychology. In particular, I focus on topics in decision theory and game theory. I am primarily interested in modes of reasoning by which we arrive at personal decisions in our day-to-day social interactions with fellow humans and our future interactions with AI.
https://www.cvbe.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/people/postdocfellows/jurgis-karpus/index.html
People
Collaborators
Guillaume Dezecache
Stefano Palminteri
Stefano is a tenured researcher at the École Normale Supérieure; where he leads the Human Reinforcement Learning team. Before that, he studied pharmaceutical biotech and cognitive neuroscience, obtained a PhD from the Pitié-Salpêtrière, and worked as a post-doc at UCL.
He is interested in studying value-based learning and decision-making at the computational and neural level. Basically, his modus operandi consists in smashing otherwise elegant reinforcement learning models, so that they can account for human behavioural biases. In his spare time, he enjoys wondering about the epistemological foundations of decision-making research.
https://lnc2.dec.ens.fr/fr/human-reinforcement-learning?lang=en
Ophelia Deroy
Ophelia Deroy is professor of philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience at the LMU in Munich. She is a member of the Munich Center of Neuroscience and PI at the interdisciplinary group « Cognition, Value, Behaviour » (CVBE).
https://www.cvbe.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/people/professors/ophelia-deroy/index.html
Ali Mahmoodi
I was born in 1988 along the Caspian Sea, in Mazandaran. I studied electrical engineering followed by an MSc in control engineering at university of Tehran, where for the first time I touched cognitive science. During my master project I started to collaborate with crowd cognition Lab which lasted until now. In February 2015, I started my PhD at Bernstein Centre Freiburg.
Research :
I am interested in humans’ social decision-making. In particular, using psychophysics, computational modeling, and functional neuroimaging, I study the process in which humans change their opinion after observing others’ opinions. Humans use their confidence to decide whether they should change their mind after receiving others’ choices. I study how confidence mediates change of mind and its neural basis. I also investigate how being in social environments affects humans’ ability to accurately track their own performance.
Joaquín Navajas
Joaquín Navajas is Assistant Professor at the School of Business at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina. He graduated in Physics in Buenos Aires, and obtained his PhD at University of Leicester. Between 2014 and 2017, he was postdoctoral researcher working with Bahador Bahrami at University College London.
Research:
My work is at the interface of a very diverse set of research lines across cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and behavioral science. Some of my projects involved searching for the neural bases of conscious perception (Navajas et al., J Nerosci., 2013), modelling individual differences in the computation of confidence in decision-making (Navajas et al., Nat Hum Behav, 2017), and studying how deliberation can increase the wisdom of crowds (Navajas et al., Nat Hum Behav, 2018). More recently, I launched a research group aimed at combining these tools to better understand how we make decisions across different domains, both at the individual and collective level.
https://www.utdt.edu/ver_contenido.php?id_contenido=14891&id_item_menu=25599
Uri Hertz
I am a lecturer at the University of Haifa, in the Department of Cognitive Sciences. I did my PhD in computational neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I studied multisensory integration and perception in Amir Amedi’s lab. Following my PhD, I joined the Crowd Cognition group, led by Bahador Bahrami, in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, and I spent a year in the University of London with The Human Mind Project.
Research:
I aim to understand the cognitive, computational and neural basis of social decision making. I use behavioural tasks online and in the lab, where participants can make decisions alone, or together. I use game-theory and machine learning models to explain the cognitive processes that drive participants’ behaviour, and to draw predictions for other decision-making scenarios. I use neuroimaging to understand the neural mechanisms supporting the participants’ behaviour, as captured by our models. I also try to examine clinical populations to underscore the social-cognitive deficits associated with different psychiatric disorders using our models and tasks.
Rani Moran
After earning his B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in mathematics, Rani worked as an algorithm developer for several years. He then returned to the academia benches and earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the MPC UCL Centre for computation psychiatry and ageing.
Research:
I am interested in the function that model-based processes serve in reinforcement learning and how these interact with model-free reinforcement learning processes. Additionally, I am interested in how top-down control mechanisms affect decisions, in sequential sampling models, in the mechanisms underlying the formation of confidence judgments and in free-recall and recognition processes in episodic memory.
Dan Bang
I am a research scientist at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL. I hold a PhD in Experimental Psychology (Oxford), an MSc in Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology (Oxford) and a BA in Linguistics (Aarhus). I have also spent 2 years in Beijing studying Mandarin Chinese.
Research:
My research addresses the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which we make decisions – with a particular focus on decision-making in social contexts. To gain insight into these mechanisms, I use behavioural testing, computational modelling and neuroimaging. I believe that a biologically-informed account of human social behaviour is important for advancing our understanding of disorders of mental health.