Nir Moneta
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, MPRG Neurocode
After finishing his B.A. in Psychology (2015) at the Open University of Israel, Nir Moneta completed his MSc in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2019) at Freie Universität Berlin, during which he worked as a research assistant in Hauke Heekeren’s lab. Since 2019 he is a predoctoral fellow working with Nico Schuck at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
In his first PhD project he investigates how outcome-irrelevant features can influence behaviour as well as (expected) value and state representations within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex using human fMRI and multivariate analysis methods. In his second project he investigates how learned reward location in an (abstract) cognitive map might influence its neural representation, focusing on grid-like representations measured in the hippocampus formation and prefrontal cortex.
Nir is fascinated both by different methods to extract information from (human) fMRI signals and by using that information to try to understand how and why people use past experience to inform their decisions. In his free time, Nir loves sports, baking and spending time with his partner.