Research overview
How does the mind cope with an uncertain world?
Our lab studies uncertainty as a central driver of learning, emotion, and decision making. We examine how people update what they know when the world changes, and how they stabilize knowledge when outcomes become reliable and fully predictable. We also ask why some individuals find uncertainty especially difficult, proposing that uncertainty aversion can shape the way the mind organizes experience, from how stimuli are perceived to how events and concepts are remembered. By combining computational modelling with behavioural and neurophysiological methods, we aim to explain how uncertainty shapes both moment to moment learning and the longer term structure of mental representations, and how these processes can be shifted to support more adaptive choices.
How does the mind create value online?
Decision-making research has predominantly focused on how people evaluate predefined options, yet in everyday life we often have to generate what the options even are, and what they mean. This line of work studies online meaning making as a core part of valuation: how people construct candidate actions and interpretations in the moment, and how those constructions become experienced as valuable. By linking semantic representations to choice, we examine how ideas move through semantic space, when people make representational shifts that feel like insight, and how the organization of knowledge shapes what comes to mind first. Our goal is to understand how semantic structure supports better option generation, higher quality decisions, and greater choice satisfaction.