Principal Investigator
Ili Ma
I am an assistant professor at Leiden University. My research aims to understand the processes that underlie how adolescents form beliefs and how these guide their decisions. I am particularly interested in adolescents’ susceptiblity to disinformation and the affective, social, and cognitive processes that shape false beliefs. I am committed to providing a supportive, inclusive, and collaborative environment for the members of my lab. As a member of the faculty council, I advocate for sustainable practices in research and education, and supportive learning environments for students.
We’re hiring!
We have openings for two PhD candidates to join our team! The projects are part of Ili’s ERC Starting Grant focussed on characterizing adolescents’ susceptibility to disinformation and misinformation. Check out the job descriptions and links to the vacancy texts: tinyurl.com/4kuey6t5
PhD students
Selin Topel
Selin is interested in how uncertainty drives learning and decision-making processes and how this might be affected by anxiety. She approaches this important topic from different perspectives, using behavioral experiments and computational models. Advisors: Anna van Duijvenvoorde, Henk van Steenbergen, and Ellen de Bruijn.
Anne Snijders
Anne uses a multi-method approach to investigate adolescents’ susceptibility to misinformation and their online risky decisions. This project contributes to understanding how social media shapes adolescent development in today’s digital age. Co-advised by Neeltje Blankenstein and Anna van Duijvenvoorde.
Daniel Sensen
Daniel investigates how adolescents and young adults update their beliefs when consuming information on social media. Using a Bayesian framework, he examines how uncertainty, along with source and message characteristics, shape belief updates and susceptibility to misinformation among the youth. Co-advised by Wouter van den Bos (UvA).
Research master students
Jaime Vigil
Jaime is deeply interested in cognitive computational modelling of social decision-making. His project focusses on how adolescents learn about other people’s latent motives that drive their social decisions. He uses a series of behavioral economic games and computational models to understand this process.
Mattan Helman
Mattan’s project aims to characterize the relationship between uncertainty intolerance and conspiracy beliefs. He is also a founder of Refuser.org.
Zeren Konuksay
Zeren is interested in online misinformation discourse. She tests the effect of critical thinking education on reasoning fallacy recognition. Her project focusses on climate change (mis)information.
Kevin Oostrum
Kevin aims to characterize age differences in social media content. He uses natural language processing and large language models.
Research Assistants
Sophie van Ooijen
Sophie is a second year bachelor’s student in Psychology. She helps the lab with various projects.