Alexander Skowron
Fellow, IMPRS COMP2PSYCH
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Lifespan Psychology
I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Leiden University (The Netherlands) in 2016 and my Master’s degree in Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience from the Free University Berlin (Germany) in 2019. I am currently affiliated with the LIFE and COMP2PSYCH IMPRS doctoral programmes. In my research, I am studying the role of neural and behavioural variability in learning and decision-making under uncertainty and how these processes change in old age. Recent research suggests that behavioural and neural variability in this context may not simply reflect imperfect processing but can rather facilitate adaptive behaviour, for example when the environment changes (e.g. Glaze et al., 2018; Findling et al., 2021). In line with work showing that declining neural variability with age relates to poorer task performance across different cognitive domains (e.g. Grady & Garrett, 2014), I hypothesise that age-related changes in learning and decision-making under uncertainty relate to less variable cognitive and neural processing. I am employing behavioural modelling and neuroimaging techniques in my research to investigate these questions.
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