Omar David Perez

I'm an Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Chile, where I landed after being a Postdoctoral Scholar in Neuroscience at the Reward and Decision Making Lab at Caltech, working on Neuroeconomics and habits under the mentorship of John O'Doherty. During that time I was also a part-time Instructor Professor and Researcher at the Nuffield College Centre for Experimental and Social Sciences (CESS) at the University of Santiago, Chile.

I did my Ph.D. studies in computational and experimental psychology in the Department of Psychology and the Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge, under the co-supervision of Mike Aitken, Amy Milton, and Anthony Dickinson. Previously, I earned a B.Sc. in Economics and an M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Santiago, Chile.

Some of the questions I try to address in my research are the following: Are our decisions based only on the comparison of utility or value among different options? How can our decisions most of the time be driven by variables that we are not consciously aware of? Why do we make decisions automatically, even when we know the consequences are not optimal? How do such automatic processes control behavior to the extent that they seem irrational and detrimental to our well-being? How do emotion and motivation come to control our otherwise controlled and rational behavior? How do psychological factors and psychiatric conditions affect the extent to which decisions are controlled by different behavioral systems? To study these questions, I borrow ideas from Psychology, Behavioral Economics, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Computer Science.