Alisa Loosen

Fellow, IMPRS COMP2PSYCH London

Alisa Loosen is a final-year PhD student of the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH Programme investigating complex decision-making and uncertainty in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) under the supervision of Tobias Hauser. Alisa has a BSc in Psychology from the University of Groningen where she also worked as a research assistant investigating the influence of personal relevance on the attentional blink. After a minor in economics and business, she worked in the field of change management before completing the Dual-Masters in Brain and Mind Sciences at UCL. Within the scope of her master’s project, she worked with Stephen Fleming and Max Rollwage on the effects of confidence on changes of mind.

In her PhD, Alisa first captured the current state of (developmental) computational psychiatric research on OCD, synthetizing observed findings in a novel neurocomputational framework before tackling open questions of the field in the remainder of her PhD work. She firstly probed the psychometric properties of a highly influential task in the field, the predictive-inference task, whose measures lead to contradictory findings when linked to OCD symptoms. She then went on to show that one of the most dominant lab-based findings in the OCD literature, increased information seeking, can also be observed in real-life situations of uncertainty such as the pandemic. Finally, in her newest patient-control study she shows increased uncertainty but unaltered learning and decision-making in OCD patients in a novel dimensional-shift task tracking participants' attentional patterns.

E-mail: a.loosen.17@ucl.ac.uk
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