Leo Sokolovic, M. Sc. Psychology, M. A. Political Science

I am working in the clinic of neurology of the Helios University Hospital Wuppertal as a clinical neuropsychologist. There I perform diagnostic assessments of neurological patients. My impression of many diagnostic instruments is that they do not have a solid theoretical foundation. Cognitive modeling offers the ideal way for a better understanding of different impairments, such as different types of dementia. Therefore, my interest on neurocomputational models of cognition was motivated by applied questions. Further, I am fascinated by the question how the brain processes language, learns new words and makes decisions. In the future, I would like to examine similarities and differences between artificial and human neural networks. Faced with the complexity of brain functioning, I believe there is no other possibility than computational modeling to understand the interplay of different cognitive processes. I love statistical and mathematical models, such as sequential sampling models. While diffusion models are an advanced measurement model, I feel that leaky noisy accumulators can be better reconciled with the localist connectionist models. In my view, local units in such a network summarize the activation of (hidden) neurons, of which we do not know what they specifically represent.