The Humphries’ lab at the University of Nottingham is seeking a postdoc to study the neural basis of foraging, in collaboration with the groups of Matthew Apps (Birmingham) and Nathan Lepora (Bristol).

Whether choosing to leave one shop for another, switching TV programs, or seeking berries to eat, humans and other animals make innumerable stay-or-leave decisions, but how we make them is not well understood. The goal of this project is to develop new computational accounts of stay-or-leave decisions, and use them to test hypotheses for how humans, primates, and rodents learn and make these decisions. The work will draw on and develop new reinforcement learning and accumulation (e.g. diffusion) models of decision-making.

The Humphries’ group researches fundamental insights into how the joint activity of neurons encodes actions in the world (https://www.humphries-lab.org). This post will join our developing research program into how humans and other animals learn to make the right decisions (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.30.505807).