Roozbeh Kiani is an Iranian-American neuroscientist whose research focuses on how the brain makes decisions under uncertainty. He is a professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University (NYU), where he directs the Perceptual and Mnemonic Decision-Making Lab at the Center for Neural Science. Kiani's work has investigated how the brain integrates evidence over time, encodes decision confidence, and flexibly adapts decision-making strategies to changing contexts.
Kiani joined the faculty at New York University in 2013 and is currently a professor in the Center for Neural Science, with an affiliated appointment with the Department of Psychology.[7] His research explores how the brain accumulates information, estimates uncertainty, and makes decisions that are both flexible and robust in the face of environmental change. Kiani's work integrates electrophysiology, neurostimulation, psychophysics, and computational modeling.
His work on decision confidence has shown how cortical neurons encode internal estimates of choice reliability and use them to guide subsequent behavior.[8] His studies of confidence-dependent hierarchical decision making [9] have shown multiscale integration processes that interact to shape behavior and have revealed how contextual cues dynamically reshape population-level neural representations.[10] Kiani has contributed to the development of causal perturbation methods to control neural population activity to shape behavior.[11] Earlier in his career, he studied object recognition, demonstrating that neurons in inferotemporal (IT) cortex represent object categories.[12]
