My name is Isabelle Hoxha, and I am currently a Fyssen fellow at Leiden University in the Netherlands. I am studying variability in decision-making using RNNs.
My PhD topic was “Neurocognitive mechanisms of perceptual anticipation in decision-making”. I was studying human brain signals, using EEG, related to anticipatory processes, as well as building theories on the emergence of anticipation and its behavioral consequences. In summary, my research is both empirical and theoretical. I graduated in July 2023.
After this, I did a short postdoc at the Human Reinforcement Learning team at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France (dir. Stefano Palminteri), where I studied biases in human reinforcement learning, in particular optimism, perseveration, and imitation.
I am interestsed in human decision-making in general. More specifically, I am curious about how humans learn to make decisions given their expectations on the state of the world, social influences, and which factors make their decisions vary on a trial-to-trial basis.
Scientific outreach is extremely important to me. I took part in particular in the French edition of the 3-minute thesis contest, and made it to the national finals. You can see my presentation here. Thanks to this experience, I have been invited to talk about my research in Spanish at Radio France International, and took part in the 2023 Pint of Science festival. I have been committed to the neuromatch and climatematch incentive since 2021, and was the chair of the communications department in 2024. I am always excited for future communication opportunities, so if you have an outreach project, don’t hesitate to contact me.
You can find a more detailed CV here.
Key words: decision-making, reinforcement learning, anticipation, predictions, signal processing, EEG, computational neuroscience