Who I am

My name is Marvin and I am a brain scientist. In my opinion, the most fascinating thing about the brain is its ability to flexibly adapt its processing to task demands. This is sometimes also called cognitive control or volitional attention or mental effort. You can think of these abilities collectively as filters (attention suppresses noise and enhances relevant signals; cognitive control suppresses reflexive responses in favor of deliberate ones) which give the brain its flexibility. State of the art artificial neural networks are trained to do one task (e.g., "label all the pedestrians in this image") or sometimes even a few tasks at once, but none can perform or learn the full range of tasks that human brains can achieve (at least for now).

What I currently do

I am a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania working on perceptual decisions and biases in decision making in Alan Stocker’s lab. My research is focused on confirmation bias, which is a cognitive bias where evidence that is inconsistent with current beliefs is discounted or suppressed. Why would your brain not evolve to correct for that bias? What are the normative reasons to have confirmation bias?

What I used to do

I received my PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Dartmouth College, where I worked with Peter Tse and Patrick Cavanagh. During that time I mainly worked on visual perception and attention in humans. We published on tracking (overt and covert) and visual illusions, such as the double-drift illusion and the frame effect. In that time I also did some octopus research. I hope some of that will be published soon.

My background

Originally, I'm from Munich, Germany, where I grew up and got my Abitur. I studied psychology at the University of Regensburg. There, I also worked as a research assistant and teaching assistant in Mark Greenlee's lab. In my free time I enjoy trying the many great burgers in the US. For some reason, I also read obscure finance blogs.

---