Welcome to the Learning Memory & Decision Lab at UCL

The research in the Wimmer LMD Lab is focused on the cognitive and neural systems underlying learning, memory, and decision-making. Most broadly, we study how the information stored in our brains influences our behavior. Decisions can be based on different types of memories. For example, innumerable positive experiences with chocolate may bias us toward choosing a chocolate dessert, while a single recent experience of a delicious chocolate cake at a restaurant might bias our choice of where to eat. By integrating across research disciplines, and inspired by our natural experience as we learn across experiences over time, we aim to design experiments that reveal key functions and advance our understanding of dysfunctions in psychiatric disorders.

Our areas of research focus on:

1. Goal-directed decision making: Examining how we form representations of our environment and use past experiences to achieve our goals.
2. Value-based decision-making: Investigating the gradual learning and long-term maintenance of value associations.
3. Emotion & Decision-making: Exploring the impact of natural and clinical variations in emotion on decision-making.

Technologies and methods

Our research uses computational modeling of behavior, large-scale online behavioral studies, transdiagnostic computational factor analysis, and decoding of neural representations using MEG, fMRI, and (in the future) optically-pumped-MEG.

Joining the Wimmer Lab

A Research Assistant position is pending being posted (Sept. 2025).

If you are curious in joining at any level, please contact Dr. Wimmer directly using the details on his UCL profile page.

Funding

We are grateful for funding from the Medical Research Council.