Computational and Developmental Psychiatry Lab

Maria studied psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience in Heidelberg, London, and Dresden before joining the lab as a PhD student in 2018. Her current post-doctoral research focuses on reinforcement learning, decision-making behavior, and motivational processes at the intersection of development and psychiatry. Specifically, she is involved in studies investigating how methylphenidate treatment alters reinforcement learning in ADHD, and how behavioral activation affects effort expenditure in juvenile depression. Moreover, she studies the impact of exploration and noise on adaptive and maladaptive decision-making across the lifespan. In these projects, she combines self-reports, cognitive tasks, and neuroimaging, using computational modeling to get a handle on the latent processes driving their interrelations.