Current projects

Choice variability

Why do teenagers often engage in seemingly reckless or unpredictable behavior? Why do they tend to make variable and inconsistent decisions? I investigate if adolescents are indeed more variable in their choices than other age groups, how this develops over time, whether this behavior is domain-general or specific to a subset of cognitive or behavioral tasks, and how this relates to other individual differences such as impulsivity or their social environment.

I also aim to extend this research to investigate to what extent choice variability can be adaptive for different individuals and how it relates to neural activity, neural development and neurochemistry.

Social learning

People often rely on others when making decisions, for example by copying others’ decisions or adapting their own decision into the direction of someone else’s. In this project, I investigate whom people rely on and when. For example, do people rely more on trusted friends and people who report to be very confident? Do people rely more on others when they are more uncertain themselves?

I research this from a developmental and computational perspective. Using Bayesian modeling and fMRI (univariate and representational similarity analyses), I assess how social learning, representations of uncertainty and neural activity change over the course of adolescence.

Digital maturity

The role of digital technology in our daily life has increased strongly over the past few years. Unsurprisingly, this caused an increase in the time people spend online. Whether this increase in use leads to positive or negative effects is determined by how digital technology is used. Recently, the EU-funded Digymatex consortium (including our research group), developed the digital maturity inventory (DIMI) as a new way to look at the capabilities and attitudes of individuals to use digital technologies in ways that support individual development and integration into society.

The DIMI uses self-report to measure ten domains, from digital literacy to emotion regulation, that constitute their digital maturity. I use psychometric network modeling to better understand the relative importance and interplay of the different domains and to increase the mature use of digital technology among adolescents.

Past projects

Modulating motivation and cognitive control

Cognitive control is an important hallmark throughout our daily lives. We need it to pursue our goals, to attend to a goal while suppressing irrelevant information and to flexibly switch between goals when necessary. In my PhD research, I addressed the role of motivation in cognitive control and how we can modulate this motivation.

Specifically, by administering dopaminergic medication and modulating task-specific reward structures, I showed that methylphenidate, an often-used cognitive enhancer that increases dopamine availability in the brain, increases a preference for cognitive control over cognitive rest. Importantly, this effect differed across individuals and depended on an individual’s baseline dopamine state, as measured by PET.

Moreover, using various behavioral paradigms that modulated the need for cognitive control in different ways, I showed that the effects of reward on cognitive control are inconsistent and are not as strong or straightforward as previously thought.