Lab members
Bernd Figner, PhD
Bernd Figner is an associate professor at the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University; he is also a senior scientist at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. Before joining Radboud, Bernd completed his PhD at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and then worked for five years at the Center for the Decision Sciences at Columbia University in the USA, followed by two years at the Psychology Department at the University of Amsterdam. Bernd’s main research interest is to understand the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying individual and group differences in risky and intertemporal decisions. In particular, his research investigates risk-taking and impulsive shortsighted decisions in developing populations with a focus on adolescents, in healthy adults, and in clinical populations. In his research he often combines different methodological approaches such as behavioral decision-making tasks, computational modeling, process-tracing, and neuroscience tools such as fMRI or brain stimulation.
Jesse Fenneman
Postdoctoral researcher
My name is Jesse Fenneman. In a nutshell, I study how environmental harshness and unpredictability shape levels of impulsivity. Building on Life History Theory, I contend that impulsivity should be understood as behaviour that maximizes fitness (i.e., survivability and reproductive success) in harsh and/or unpredictable environments. In my work I distinguish between two definitions of impulsivity: information preference (i.e., thinking before acting) and delay of gratification (rather having small things now, than bigger things later). To test my hypotheses I create mathematical models to find what level of impulsivity maximizes fitness in different environments. I subsequently test the predictions these models make on an empirical samples.
Zhang Chen
Felix Klaassen
Postdoctoral researcher
Hi, I’m Felix. I acquired my degrees in Psychology (BSc) and Cognitive Neuroscience (MSc) at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. After completing my Master’s, I joined Prof. Alan Sanfey’s Decision Neuroscience lab (Donders Institute) where I developed an interest in decision-making and became familiar with incorporating a variety of research methods, such as threat of shock, the use of psychophysiological measurements, and computational modeling. I then joined the EPAN and D2P2 labs as a Research Assistant to set up the new Dare2Approach ERC-CoG project. Since 2019, I have worked as a PhD student and now as postdoc on this project under supervision of Karin Roelofs, Bernd Figner and Linda de Voogd. I aim to develop an understanding of how defensive freezing affects approach/avoid decision-making under threat and how this is represented in the brain (e.g., the periaqueductal gray [PAG]). To do this, I measure psychophysiological indices of freezing, such as heart rate and body immobility, and relate these to people’s choices and PAG activation during threat anticipation. In later experiments, I aim to infer the causal role of the PAG in freezing and decision-making by manipulating its activity using deep brain stimulation (DBS).
Floor Burghoorn
PhD student
Hi, I am Floor, and I am a PhD student in this lab. I obtained a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Behavioural Science at Radboud University Nijmegen. My PhD project focuses on people’s tendency to prefer small immediate rewards over large delayed rewards, which has been found to form a transdiagnostic process across various maladaptive behaviours and mental health disorders. I aim to gain a better understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie this choice tendency, by investigating whether impatient intertemporal choice may be driven by a Pavlovian bias (elicited by cues signalling immediate rewards) interfering with goal-directed behaviour towards delayed rewards.
Mingqian Guo
PhD student
Hi, I am Mingqian Guo, and I am a graduate student in this lab. I obtained my Master’s degree at South China Normal University in 2020. During my Master’s degree program, I used a proportion congruent effect paradigm to study contingency learning in the Simon task. In my current project, I mainly focus on using simple cognitive models such as drift diffusion models to investigate ambiguity aversion in intertemporal choice.
Fritz Wienicke
PhD student
I am Fritz and I work as a Ph.D. student at the Behavioural Science Institute since September 2021. In my research, I investigate the efficacy of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (STPP) for depression with individual participant data meta-analyses. With this research, I aim to shed new light on the long-running debate around the evidence base of STPP among scientists, policymakers, and clinical practitioners. Next to the efficacy of STPP for depression I also research patient characteristics as treatment effect modifiers (so-called ‘moderators’) and predictors of depression relapse after the end of therapy. I hope that this research will contribute to future treatment selection models and enable us to prevent depression relapse and thereby lower the burden of the disorder.
Meylisa Sari
PhD student
Hi! I’m Meylisa, a PhD student in this lab. I have a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Universitas Tarumanagara Indonesia and an MSc in Business Analytics and Decision Sciences from the University of Leeds, UK. For my PhD project, I will explore the role of cultural differences in time perception in intertemporal decision-making, specifically in the context of retirement saving decisions.
Meghana Vadakkedath Dharmapalan
Master student
Hi! I’m Meghana, a research master’s student in Behavioral Science at BSI. Previously, I pursued a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Kasturba Medical College, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from the University of Kerala, India. Currently I am focusing on testing a sequential choice paradigm by Zhang and Bernd to explore the propensity for gambling choices in healthy adults. My research interests include risky decision-making, crisis situations, and statistical methodologies.
Ben Kretzler
Master student
Hi, I am Ben! Currently, I am doing a lab rotation in this lab as part of my master’s in cognitive neuroscience. Thereby, I am assisting in a study on the transdiagnostic role of intertemporal impatience in mental health problems. Apart from the lab rotation, I am focusing on my master’s thesis project, where I test whether treatment outcomes can be predicted from cognitive tasks using noise-based classification. Besides these projects, my research interests comprise (intertemporal) decision-making, behavioral economics, and applications of complexity theory in the social sciences.
Alumni
PhD students
Julian Quandt
Johannes Algermissen
Iris Ikink
Nicole Walasek
Isabel Woyke
Research associates
Vivian Heuvelmans
Kaycee Stewart
Master students
Virag Fodor
Ömer Ergün
David Esmeijer
David Renjaän
Harshil Vyas
Marco Schauer
Leslie Held
Afreen Khalid
Vaibhav Arya. To our deep sadness, Vab passed away in 2020. Vab was a strongly motivated and inspiring member of our lab, who never hesitated to offer his help to anyone. We will sorely miss him.
Lena Schäfer
Liis Burket
Leon Mait
Farnaz Mosannenzadeh
Joppe Klein Breteler
Edwin Schenkel
Niels Kukken