Back Alex Hyafil

HYAFIL, ALEX

ALEX HYAFIL
Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica

I am interested in: Bayesian models of perception, Decision making, motivation, machine learning for behavioral and neural data analysis. 

One discovery I am proud of: How do our recent experiences bias our decisions? We found that rats can exploit on the history of their recent decisions to predict what's the next decision to make. Surprisingly, this bias disappeared right after the animal made an error, although the memory of previous decisions was maintained - suggesting that errors made the animals prone to adopt a more cautious stance.

One thing I would like to discover next: The algorithmic principles used by the cortex to infer the structure of the environment from raw sensory information

One article I would like you to read:  Hermoso-Mendizabal, A., Hyafil, A., Rueda-Orozco, P.E. et al. Response outcomes gate the impact of expectations on perceptual decisions. Nat Commun 11, 1057 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14824-w .