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I am a PhD student in neuroscience at UCL, currently working with Ray Dolan at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. I am interested in subcortical structures, such as the basal ganglia, that are involved in learning and action selection.

News

2013

      • March: Some colleagues and I have published an iPhone and Android app called The Great Brain Experiment. Be part of a big science experiment by playing games we use in neuroscience research on your phone. The data is sent back to us (anonymously) for our research! See the website, or download for Apple or Android.
      • January: I wrote a blog post on habits for a Wellcome Trust blog called ThInk.

2012

  • October: I’m heading for SfN to present work on action inhibition, and in November the Neurobiology of Emotion conference to present new work on model-based/model-free behavior. Come by the poster if you want to chat!
  • August: paper now available for free on Neuron website (or download PDF here)
  • June & July: I’ll be presenting the model-based/model-free L-DOPA paper at the UCL neuroscience symposium and at FENS in Barcelona (poster details for FENS here).
  • May: Paper accepted at Neuron, out soon! I’ll present this paper at the Einstein Fellowship Symposium in Berlin

Wunderlich K*, Smittenaar P*, Dolan R
Dopamine enhances model-based over model-free choice behavior


  • April: Paper published in European Journal of Neuroscience, in a special edition titled ‘Beyond Simple Reinforcement Learning’. Have a look at the table of contents for many other papers on dopamine in reward.

Smittenaar P, Chase HW, Aarts E, Nusselein B, Bloem BR, Cools R
Decomposing effects of dopaminergic medication in Parkinson’s disease on probabilistic action selection: learning or performance?

2011

  • October: Together with Rumana Chowdhury I’m organising the Methods for Dummies 2011-12 at the FIL. More information here.
  • July: I’ll be joining Ray Dolan’s group in September for my PhD. I plan on studying the basal ganglia, a group of subcortical nuclei that communicate with most parts of the cortex. The basal ganglia are especially interesting in the light of action selection, reinforcement learning and a myriad of diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and addiction.
  • May: Started my third rotation in Steve Kennerley’s lab at the Institute of Neurology, Sobell Department.
  • April: Off to Berlin in a few days for a symposium on decision-making, organized by Ray Dolan. I’ll be presenting a poster on the work I’ve done in the past 3 months.
  • February: I started my second rotation with Ray Dolan at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging.

2010

  • December: This month I’ll be at the Physiological Society’s cross-themed meeting in Durham. Also, I wrote a few words on my experiences during the first few months of the 4-year PhD programme for the UCL neuroscience website.
  • November: Starting my first rotation in Jonathan Ashmore‘s lab.