Ili Ma is an assistant professor in the Developmental and Educational Psychology unit of the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University.

More information about Ili Ma

Ili Ma is an assistant professor in the Developmental and Educational Psychology unit of the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University.  

She aims to understand the computational and neurocognitive processes that underlie the development of active learning and complex decision-making. She is especially interested in how these processes operate in social contexts.

Short CV

Ili obtained her PhD at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in 2017. During her PhD, she combined fMRI and behavioral measures to investigate the interaction between motivation and inhibition in adolescents with and without ADHD. She then became a postdoc at the Donders Institute working on social beliefs using behavioral experiments and computational models of information sampling. She was awarded a NWO Rubicon fellowship to continue her work at New York University. In November 2020, she joined Leiden University as an assistant professor.

Research

Ili’s interest in active learning pertains to how adolescents learn to anticipate the behavior, goals, and preferences of their peers, but also how they might influence each other when they learn together or solve problems together. Her research interests further extend to how these processes of learning and decision-making are affected by psychopathology and adversity. This includes ADHD, Autism, social exclusion, and scarcity. 

Ili aims to acquire a mechanistic understanding of these processes by using computational modelling of behavior and neuroimaging (fMRI). The computational modelling approach allows for quantification of latent variables that are not directly observable from behavior, such as an individual’s beliefs and their uncertainty.

For more information see Github.
 

Grants

•    2020 National Science Foundation sub award ($89.962 USD)
•    2018 NWO Rubicon award (€134.764)

Teaching

•    Developmental and Educational Psychology (Coordinator)
•    Master theses
•    Bachelor projects
•    Research internships
•    Perspective on Career Planning
•    The Adolescent Brain 

Publications