A fully-funded PhD is immediately available with Dr Silvia Maggi and Professor Mark Humphries (University of Nottingham) and Dr Hazem Toutonji (University of Sheffield).

Decision-making happens in dynamic environments. Understanding how subjects respond to such a fast-changing world requires approaches that can track subject's choice strategies at the resolution of single trials.  We recently published a Bayesian inference algorithm (Maggi et al., 2024, eLife) that enables trial-resolution tracking of learning and exploration during decision-making. 

This project will build on this work to solve crucial problems of determining which of a set of behavioural strategies a subject is using and how to incorporate evidence uncertainty into its detection of the learning of strategies and transitions between them. Using the extended algorithm on datasets of rodents and humans performing decision tasks will let us test a range of hypotheses for how correct decisions are learnt and what innate strategies are used.

Studentship is for  "Home" students only 
Application deadline:  May 30th 2024
PhD start date: July 1st 2024

Please send all queries to Silvia (silvia.maggi@nottingham.ac.uk) or Mark (mark.humphries@nottingham.ac.uk)

Full details and how to apply here: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/psychology/study-with-us/phd-by-research/school-funded-phd-studentship.aspx




Professor Mark Humphries | Professor of Computational Neuroscience


Lab: humphries-lab.org

Twitter: @markdhumphries

Public blog: https://medium.com/the-spike

Book: "The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds" (Princeton UP) out now in paperback: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691241487/the-spike


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