Thorsten Kahnt

The ultimate goal of my research is to understand the neural processes that determine how individuals make decisions and how the consequences of their decisions affect future choices. Therefore, I investigate how the brain represents the variables that guide our behavior and how learning changes these variables. To address these questions, I use a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), computational models of learning and decision making and multivariate analysis techniques borrowed from machine learning. Before I moved to Zurich, I studied psychology in Berlin and obtained my PhD in Neuroscience at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. During my PhD, I investigated neural representations of reward expectancies and how these representations change with learning.