¹û½´ÊÓƵ

PhD: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Germany, 2013
M.A. Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, 2007
B.Sc. Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, 2004

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

Name Pronunciation Guide:
"Ah-nee-ta Too-shuh"

Click below to hear pronunciation

Research Interests

Our lab is interested in the processes that drive variance in human decision-making across people, context and time. Here are four primary questions of our research program:

• Human beings are inherently social and a considerable part of our thoughts, decisions, and behaviour concerns the people around us. What processes explain our remarkable ability to understand others (e.g. empathy) and how does it shape choices that involve other people (e.g. strategic or altruistic behaviour)?

• In complex and constantly changing environments, we are faced with countless decisions and choice settings. Specialized neural codes for all possible types of scenarios seem inefficient. What choice model accounts for commonalities and differences across choice domains (i.e. dietary vs. altruistic vs. investing behaviour)?

• How can we increase ‘good’ decisions that yield long-term benefits for the decision-maker and/or society at large (e.g. eat healthier, save for retirement, be kinder, consumer choices that are environmentally friendly)?

• What is the specific role of attention in guiding people’s behaviour, and how does it affect the processes in the brain?

To address these questions, I draw on methods and insights from different disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience (especially fMRI), computational modelling (e.g. multivariate decoding techniques of brain data or drift-diffusion models), and behavioral economics (in a newly emerging field called neuroeconomics).

Selected Publications

Name Pronunciation Guide:
"Ah-Lie-uh As-MunD-Sen"

Click below to hear pronunciation