My Research
How does the brain decide what activities are worth the effort? And how are those decisions shaped by the body's metabolic state?
I am a cognitive neuroscientist interested in the biological and computational mechanisms underlying motivation. My research began by asking how we decide where to allocate cognitive effort, and has increasingly focused on how the need to manage energetic resources constrains these decisions.
I am particularly interested in the connection between metabolism and mental health: how metabolic signals influence motivation, cognition and reward, and whether disruptions to these systems contribute to depression. I approach these questions using behavioural experiments, computational modelling and normative theory.
1. Metabolic Psychiatry
How do energetic constraints shape brain function, behaviour and mental health?
Metabolic psychiatry asks how the systems that regulate our energy influence the way we think, feel and behave. My research investigates whether metabolic dysfunction can help explain some of the motivational and cognitive changes seen in depression, and whether this might reveal new ways of understanding and treating the disorder.
I have investigated how individual differences in glucose regulation relate to reward learning and depressive symptoms, and how metabolic signals influence affect and behaviour. I have also contributed to theoretical work developing an account of how metabolic and mental ill health may be linked through the brain's regulation of energy.
My current work builds on these findings to ask how metabolic state constrains motivation and effort allocation, with the longer-term aim of developing a computational account of motivational dysfunction in depression.
2. Cognitive control & mental effort
How does the brain decide where to invest its limited cognitive resources?
Before turning towards metabolic psychiatry, my research focused on cognitive effort: why some tasks feel more demanding than others, and how we decide whether the benefits of an action are worth the effort required to achieve them.
During my PhD, I developed behavioural methods for measuring cognitive effort independently of task difficulty, and used computational models to investigate how effort influences decision-making and cognitive control. This work included studying how cognitive training alters the influence of Pavlovian biases on behaviour, and developing a normative account of how an agent should trade off time and accuracy when allocating cognitive resources.
I continue to be interested in the broader question of how cognitive resources should be allocated. More recently, I have begun exploring Ergodicity Economics as a framework for understanding how decisions about effort and cognitive resources unfold over time.