Adventures of a Mathematician in Cognitive Science

In this seminar, I will discuss how mathematics can help us understand human decision-making. Categorical decisions have been of interest to many disciplines including neuroscience. Recent advances have indicated how such decisions are computed in the brain and how the choice circuits performing such computations are organized. This knowledge allowed me to create a mechanistic model of the choice circuit (Penconek, 2020) that generates realistic network dynamics and behavioral predictions. This model has been applied to study the influence of alpha oscillations on decision-making and to two classical problems of psychophysics: the speed-accuracy trade-off (Penconek, 2022) and Weber's law (Penconek, 2025).