Johanna Falk

Current position

I started my postdoc project under the supervision of Mathias Pessiglione in February 2024. My position is funded by a two-year mobility grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Project

Research on value-based decision-making has traditionally focused on settings in which individuals express their preferences among a limited set of options presented together (typically two items on a computer screen). This approach ignores the fact that in more ecological situations the set of available options is not predefined. Rather, the options must be discovered through an active, sequential exploration process before preferences can be expressed. In this sort of situation, the question is therefore when to stop exploration and commit to a final choice. The general goal is to develop a mechanistic understanding of how individuals decide to pursue exploration versus commit to a choice, when the likeability of the unexplored options is unknown and the number of potential options is seemingly unlimited. Additionally, the project seeks to investigate how mood variations and psychiatric symptoms influence this decision-making process.

My background

I studied Psychology in Germany, Luxembourg and France and completed my PhD in Switzerland. During my studies, I worked as a research assistant in the Clinical Psychophysiology Lab at the University of Luxembourg and in the Comparative Psychology Lab at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. I then worked in the Geneva Motivation Lab at the University of Geneva, first as a research and teaching assistant and then briefly as a postdoctoral researcher, before joining the Motivation Brain Behavior Lab at the Paris Brain Institute as a postdoctoral researcher.

Contact

johanna.falk@icm-institute.org