You can also find my papers on my Google Scholar profile.
The aim of my PhD work was to gain an understanding of how humans seek information. We are very effective in exploring our complex environment, collecting the information we need to pursue our goals. How do we do that? Consequently, we seem to be very curious creatures. Some economists have calculated that we are too curious. What guides our motivation to seek information that appears useless?
My postdoctoral work at the UCL Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry builds on these questions, studying how learning processes shape mood and motivation—and how they may underlie the therapeutic effects of antidepressants.
Mkrtchian, A., Qiu, Z., Abir, Y., Erdmann, T., Dercon, Q., Sedlinska, T., ... & Huys, Q. J. (2025). Dopamine and serotonin differentially associated with reward and punishment processes in humans: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA psychiatry, 82(8), 818.
Is curiosity a drive to seek information for its own sake, or an adaptive policy we learn from experience? In this study, we tested these two ideas: one suggests curiosity fades once it’s satisfied, while the other argues that satisfying curiosity can make us even more curious in the future. Across data from over 5,000 people, we found strong evidence for the latter. When people learned something that felt surprisingly satisfying, they became more curious about related topics—and less curious about unrelated ones. These findings suggest that curiosity is not just a built-in urge, but a habit we learn through experience. This helps explain why people often seek far more information than can be justified by practical or economic benefit: we explore not only to make better decisions, but also to learn what kinds of things are worth being curious about.
Abir, Y., Mok, J., Baldassano, C., Marvin, C., & Shohamy, D. (2025). Learning Reinforces Curiosity.
How do humans achieve the goal of resolving uncertainty when they explore their environment? We find that rather than always exploring the parts of their environment they are more uncertain about, individuals sometimes avoid learning about uncertain options. They do so when uncertainty is very high for all parts of the environment. We think the strategic balance between approaching and avoiding uncertainty helps humans manage their cognitive resources when faced with complex problems.
Abir, Y., Shadlen, M. N., & Shohamy, D. (2024). Human Exploration Strategically Balances Approaching and Avoiding Uncertainty. eLife, 13.
Combining data that we collected in the early days of the pandemic, computational modeling, and decades-old theory, we show that motivation has two roles in determining information-seeking. When COVID-19 suddenly became motivationally relevant, that change in motivation directed individuals to seek COVID-19-related information, but also energized the seeking of unrelated information. Our results challenge the view that human information-seeking is driven by an erratic and maladaptive curiosity drive. Instead, we find that humans are rational in seeking information, be it celebrity gossip or ways to keep ourselves safe from a novel pathogen.
Abir, Y., Marvin, C. B., van Geen, C., Leshkowitz, M., Hassin, R. R., & Shohamy, D. (2022). An energizing role for motivation in information-seeking during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Communications, 13(1), 1-10.
Before graduate school, I worked with Ran Hassin, studying how our conscious perceptions are selected from the multitude of stimulation feeding into our visual systems.
Sklar, A. Y., Goldstein, A. Y., Abir, Y., Goldstein, A., Dotsch, R., Todorov, A., & Hassin, R. R. (2021). Did you see it? Robust individual differences in the speed with which meaningful visual stimuli break suppression. Cognition, 211, 104638.
Research into the determinants of consciousness too often relies on a single technique: continuous flash suppression. We developed a new technique, repeated masked suppression, with which scientists can examine the central process of prioritization to consciousness across different awareness suppression techniques. It also allows for online experiments, which since the pandemic have had a central role in advancing cognitive science.
Abir, Y., & Hassin, R. R. (2020). Getting to the heart of it: multi-method exploration of nonconscious prioritization processes. Consciousness and Cognition, 85, 103005.
We developed a computational method to visualize and analyze the factors determining the contents of our visual consciousness. We focused on faces, and found that faces that are perceived as more dominant are prioritized for consciousness. We show that this result cannot be explained by low-level differences in visual input, but is rather a holistic trait of a face.
Abir, Y., Sklar, A. Y., Dotsch, R., Todorov, A., & Hassin, R. R. (2018). The determinants of consciousness of human faces. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(3), 194-199.