I’m a neuroscience PhD student at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behavior at University College London (UCL).
In the Erlich Lab, I try to understand various cognitive processes and neural computations contributing to the behavioural level risk preference revealed by choices under uncertainty. To decompose risk preference, we designed two parallel risky choice tasks that stress decision-policy vs learning respectively, to study their interaction with risky decision-making, and specifically which mediates dopamine’s influence to risk preference. Here you can find my poster at Society for Neuroeconomics 2025 showcasing the current progress of the project.
To study this, we borrow from the human and non-human primates literature, use rodent behavior model to facilitate recording and manipulating brain activity, and use various cognitive and mechanistic model (RL, active inference, dynamical system, etc.) to try capture and explain the cognitive algorithms and neural mechanisms of learning and decision-making processes under uncertainty.
Before the PhD program in systems neuroscience, I studied philosophy (of mind, of science, of cognition), economics (game theory, microeconomics, econometrics), and cognitive science in my college time, with an overall interest in human mind and behavior, and collected relevant quantitative skills along the way. They now came together to sculpture my current research direction.
Shoot me an email at cong%dot%sun%dot%swc%at%gmail.com if you are interested in the things glossed over above (or anything)! Have a good day.