Agata Ludwiczak

Dr Agata Ludwiczak BSc, MSc, PhD

Lecturer in Psychology

Agata Ludwiczak joined the School of Human Sciences as a Lecturer in June 2021. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), in March 2016. Since then, she has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Dynamic Learning and Decision-making Lab, Biological and Experimental Psychology, QMUL. The projects she has been involved in explored the way in which context (e.g. presence/absence of feedback, availability of monetary/social incentives, opportunities to communicate with others) affects the choices that people make. Her current research looks at how effort costs are incorporated into the decision-making process, and how this affects our willingness to exert effort for rewards.

Agata’s interests also include cognitive clinical neuropsychology. She has completed an MSc in Clinical Neuroscience at University College London (UCL). During her Ph.D., she worked as an Honorary Assistant Psychologist at the Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, UCL Institute of Neurology. In this role, she was responsible for conducting a neuropsychological assessment of Parkinson’s Disease and Cluster Headache patients.

Research / Scholarly interests

Agata’s research focuses on the way in which contextual factors affect the decision-making process. Within this broader theme, she has looked at how feedback impacts complex dynamic decision-making in people with Parkinson’s disease, and how effort costs are processed in this clinical population. In a recent project with Barts Health NHS Trust, Agata has explored how risk forecasts differ between high-risk surgical patients and their doctors, and how this impacts the decisions about surgical treatment.

Her research on effort-based decision-making in young adults has led to the development of a Value-Effort-Decision-Making model, which describes the processing steps critical for making decisions when an effort is involved. This model constitutes the basic framework for Agata’s research, which currently focuses on the role of social rewards in effort-based decision-making.