E. Mainetto (Elena)

Elena has recently started her PhD as part of the Language in Interaction consortium at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, supervised primarily by Dr. Hanneke den Ouden and Prof. Roshan Cools. Her research investigates the role of dopamine in inference for language and planning, using a combination of functional MRI, psychopharmacology and computational modeling in healthy human volunteers.

Elena obtained her bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Pisa (Italy). She then completed her Master in Cognitive Neuroscience at Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento (Italy). During this time, she worked on her thesis’s project at Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Sudi Avanzati (SISSA, Trieste, Italy), in Raffaella Rumiati’s lab. After her studies, she was hired as research assistant in Paul Fletcher’s lab at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge (UK). Both in Trieste and in Cambridge, she specialized in behavioral and neural mechanisms facilitating reward processing and decision making, using food as primary reward.

• Perception, Action and Decision-making

• Learning & decision-making