Our long-term research agenda is to understand the nature of flexible and adaptive behaviours in humans and biological agents in general. In a nutshell, we try to understand the ability to learn and adapt from limited experience.
What is the interplay between higher order cognitive functions and reinforcement learning processes? How is uncertainty represented in the brain and what role does it play in decision making? What are the computational properties of metacognition and reasoning? What is generalization and what are its neural/computational underpinnings?
We study these questions in healthy participants as well as in clinical populations, by using a big magnet (fMRI), and a combination of real-time experiments, psychophysics, behavioural tasks, computational modeling and simulations, and some machine learning.
Our research can be divided in four main streams:
1) Decision-making, cognition and metacognition
2) Reinforcement learning
3) Maladaptive behaviours in psychiatric disorders
4) Characterization of brain dynamics