Johannes Algermissen

Johannes Algermissen is currently a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Miriam Klein-Flügge at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. He is interested in how humans make so called "foraging" decisions in which they decide whether to stay and persist with a choice option they currently have or wheher to leave and explore whether there might be better alternative options available. He uses large-scale online testing, computational modelling of behaviour, fMRI recordings, and will use transcranial ultrasonic stimulation (TUS) in the future.

He obtained Bachelor’s degrees in psychology and philosophy (minor in mathematics) at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany, in 2014. After a year at the University of Helsinki, Finland, he pursued a Research Master degree in Behavioural Science at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, graduating summa cum laude in 2017. In his Master’s thesis, he investigated trade-offs between cognitive labour and leisure using pupillometry. During his degree, he also spent two months at Columbia University, New York City, working on intertemporal choice and procrastination together with Eric J. Johnson and Bernd Figner.

From 2017 till 2022, he pursued a PhD in cognitive neuroscience with Dr. Hanneke den Ouden at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His thesis work investigated "Pavlovian" (or "motivational") biases in learning and decision-making, in particular i) how these biases arise through the interplay of cortical and subcortical brain areas, ii) how these biases can be suppressed, iii) how these biases can be adaptively used by selectively exposing oneself to cues that trigger them. To answer these questions, he used computational modeling of behavior, simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings, eye-tracking, and MEG.

Besides his PhD work, Johannes is enthusiastically involved in several open science projects aiming to improve psychology and cognitive neuroscience, such as the EEGManyPipelines project, and eCOBIDAS.