Zhaoqi (Claire) Zhang

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Karolinska Institutet, working in the Social and Affective Learning and Decision-Making group. My current research investigates how environmental harshness shapes social learning and decision-making, with a particular focus on the development of prosocial and antisocial behaviors across different cultural contexts.

I completed my PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University and the Donders Institute, where I studied how autonomy and active choice influence learning and memory. My doctoral work combined behavioral experiments, computational approaches, and neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI and EEG) to investigate how the motivational benefits of choice interact with reward, prediction, and surprise. Across my work, I am interested in understanding how individuals learn and adapt their behavior in response to the opportunities, constraints, and uncertainty present in their environment.

My research broadly focuses on how environmental conditions shape learning, decision-making, and adaptive behavior. I am particularly interested in agency and autonomy: how having opportunities to choose, control outcomes, or influence one’s environment changes the way people learn and behave. My previous research examined these questions in nonsocial learning and memory, focusing on active choice, prediction, surprise, and reward.

I am now extending these interests to social learning and decision-making, investigating how environmental harshness and perceived controllability influence the learning of prosocial and antisocial behaviors across cultures. Methodologically, I am interested in integrating behavioral experiments with computational modeling, neuroimaging, psychophysiology, and cross-cultural approaches. Ultimately, I aim to understand both shared and individual-specific mechanisms through which people adapt their learning and decisions to different social and environmental contexts.