Neural mechanisms of perceptual decision making have been extensively studied in
experimental settings that mimic stable environments with repeating stimuli, fixed rules, and …

Many decisions involve choosing an uncertain course of action in deep and wide decision
trees, as when we plan to visit an exotic country for vacation. In these cases, exhaustive …

Metacognition is the ability to weigh the quality of our own cognition, such as the confidence
that our perceptual decisions are correct. Here we ask whether metacognitive performance …

Learning to make adaptive decisions depends on exploring options, experiencing their
consequence, and reassessing one's strategy for the future. Although several studies have …

A central purpose of exploration is to reduce goal-relevant uncertainty. Consequentially,
individuals often explore by focusing on areas of uncertainty in the environment. However …

Cognitive theories attribute humans' unparalleled capacity in solving complex multistage
decision problems to distinctive hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning strategies. Here …

Our tendency to be curious about our environment and our capacity to effectively explore it
are central to human intelligence. This dissertation takes a functional approach to …

While approaches based on physical grounds (such as the drift-diffusion model—DDM)
have been exhaustively used in psychology and neuroscience to describe perceptual …