Personen am Institut Psychologie

In the research group of Prof. Loes van Dam I am studying the mind to learn from the mind. I am building models based on human (motor) behaviour using optimal control (OC) and machine learning (ML) to explain and explore cognitive functions. This approach, lately labeled as neuroconnectionsims, differs from an engineering perspctive on ML in that its objective is not optimization of performance per se, but testing and developing theories about the workings of our mind and brain.

My goal is to use these methods to better understand how we humans perceive the world, act and interact in it, and use that understanding to improve solutions to engineering problems.

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TAM

At TU-Darmstadt I am part of the The Adaptive Mind project, where we cooperate with the Translational Neuroimaging (TNM) Lab from the University Marburg. Our collaboration focusses on the perception causality, its implications for embodied concepts such as a sense of agency (SoA), and its disturbances in psychoses such as schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD).

In our approach we explore implicit measurements of an SoA and ways to model an SoA using methods from OC and ML. We want to find out if the paradigms and models we develop can be applied as early behavioural biomarkers for diagnosing SSD or testing hypotheses about the inner processes of the disorder.