My name is Steven (he/him), and I am an experimental psychologist. I like to learn new things. More specifically, with the help of computational models I try to get a better understanding of the human brain and how humans behave.
If I am not chasing new knowledge, I like to do sports (bouldering, chess, cycling, swimming).
As of September 2023, I am working as a doctoral researcher in the Biological Psychology team of Prof Dr Jan Peters at the University of Cologne. I am using computational models to describe and predict human behaviour in decision-making tasks in order to get a better understanding of the underlying processes.
Currently, I am looking at changes in risky decision-making when people are hungry or tired.
As a side project, I am an IT consultant. I can be hired for a variety of IT related tasks, with a focus on data analysis.
An example of an earlier assignment. The Belgian road safety institute VIAS contacted me to program several experiments to study the visibility of the Belgian police. I created three reaction time tasks (two with images, one with videos), and a preprocessing script for the online data.
October 2022 - August 2023 As a research assistant in the Computational Neurology Research Group of Prof Dr Xenia Kobeleva, I created a fMRI preprocessing pipeline to prepare the analysis of the large fMRI datasets we use. Additionally, I worked on a study about cognitive reserve where I tried to predict cognitive functioning based on neuropathophysiological markes in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
Under supervision of Dr Anna Marzecová, I tried to explain human behaviour under uncertainty with reinforcement learning models. When I find the time, I hope to continue this work since a lot more can be done.
If you want to reach out, BlueSky or Mastodon are the easiest.
For legal purposes: my BTW number is 0800.486.263