Dr Erdem Pulcu
Senior Researcher, Department of Psychiatry
Academic profile
About
Dr Erdem Pulcu is interested in investigating models of reinforcement learning and social interactive decision-making in patients with depression and healthy volunteers undergoing pharmacological manipulation.
Watch a brief animation explaining the logic behind ongoing research into major depression and negative biases: Major Depressive Disorder and Negative Biases (Pulcu & Browning, eLife 2017).
Other interests involve evolutionary models of human social behaviours.
Dr Pulcu obtained a doctoral degree from University of Manchester Medical School in 2014, studying social and value-based decision-making impairments in patients with major depressive disorder and their neurobiology. After graduation, Dr Pulcu worked as a postdoctoral researcher in RIKEN Brain Sciences Institute (Tokyo) and Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet; Osaka) working on computational models of decision-making under uncertainty and in competitive, social interactive games.
Expertise
- Psychiatry
- Behavioural modelling
- Neuroimaging
- Major depression
- Altruism
Selected publications
- Humans adapt rationally to approximate estimates of uncertainty (2025)
- Using a generative model of affect to characterize affective variability and its response to treatment in bipolar disorder (2022)
- Dynamic modulation of inequality aversion in human interpersonal negotiations (2022)
- The Misestimation of Uncertainty in Affective Disorders (2019)
- Affective bias as a rational response to the statistics of rewards and punishments (2017)
- Social-economical decision making in current and remitted major depression (2014)
- Temporal discounting in major depressive disorder (2013)