I study how humans and other animals learn to make good decisions about the rewards in their environment. My research mixes ideas and approaches from animal learning, human neuroscience, and artificial intelligence in trying to build and test computer models of the simple learning algorithms embodied in the brain.

Current projects in my lab explore how people make decisions where rewards are either uncertain or delayed, the factors that influence dishonest behaviour in people, curiosity and exploration in pigeons, the formation of habits, and the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in timing and time perception.

Research topics: Reinforcement learning, decision making, risky choice, gambling, moral decision-making, social learning, timing and time perception, decisions from experience, planning and imagination, episodic memory, fairness perception, classical and operant conditioning, computational modeling, neuroeconomics, epigenetics, and comparative cognition.