I’m a postdoc at Cornell University in the Laboratory of Neurobiology of Learning and Memory led by Prof. David Smith.

Prior to this, I completed my PhD work in the AMP Lab under the supervision of Prof. Khena Swallow at Cornell. Before that, I was a research trainee at the Harvard Medical School (working on how auditory cues guide visual search), a visiting student research collaborator at Princeton (studying people’s willingness to exert effort and its relationship to how they balance model-based versus model-free reinforcement learning), and I completed my B.Sc. and M.Sc. at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Since 2017, I have also been the assistant curator of Cornell’s famous Wilder Brain Collection, a volunteer position through which I regularly organize science outreach events for kids and adolescents in upstate New York.

Click here to download my full CV or go here for the abridged online version.

My Research

A longstanding idea in behavioral and brain sciences is that our perception, attention, and memory are limited and fallible. And yet, despite our limitations, we are able to adapt our moment-to-moment decision-making effectively. How does the brain manage its limited resources and somehow still produce highly adaptive and skilled behavior? My research aims to provide a comprehensive description of the psychological, computational, and neurobiological mechanisms underpinning how perception, attention, memory, and decision-making systems (i) filter out and integrate behaviorally-relevant multisensory information in dynamic and eventful environments, (ii) decide what does and does not get represented on the so-called “cognitive map”, and (iii) retrieve context-appropriate memories to flexibly guide ongoing behavior.

As Kurt Lewin said, “Nothing is as practical as a good theory” and I utilize theories from event processing, multisensory cognition, and on interactions between attention & memory to study the aforementioned paradox between limitations of the mind and expertise in behavior. Objects & their perceptual features, agents and their actions, as well as any implied relationships between them constitute “features of events” that the mind seems to integrate into a coherent representation that allows for efficient cognition and flexible decision-making.

Because I investigate dynamic cognitive processes, my work crosses traditional research boundaries and requires a diverse methodological approach. I do research with both human subjects and rodents, collecting rich datasets with ecological behavior, neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG/LFP, neural spikes), physiology (e.g. eyetracking & pupillometry), and invasive manipulations (optogenetics). I then utilize various model-based/computational neuroscience methods to elucidate mechanisms in those data, such as sequential evidence accumulation models (e.g. drift-diffusion models, linear ballistic accumulators) or reinforcement learning models (e.g. model-based versus model-free learning trade-offs). Importantly, I care about ecological and naturalistic behavior as much as I do about the fundamental computational properties of single neurons and so I emphasize a balanced utilization of highly controlled paradigms (such as head-fixed rodents) and neural recordings of animals during free & self-guided behavior.

All this highlights my personal belief that the most creative and innovative research takes place at the intersection of topics and methods that have historically remained separated. By placing the focus on overarching theories of ecological and adaptive behavior, first and foremost, I try to generate interesting research questions about neural mechanisms and then employ the best tools to answer those questions, rather than having our available tools guide the questions we ask.

With the Smith Lab at SfN ‘23 in Washington DC

Under Construction & In Transition

Please note that this personal website is currently under construction and in the process of transitioning to hamidturker.com.