Davide Gheza

Cognitive neuroscientist · Staff Scientist, Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

About

I study how the brain decides where attention goes, and when thinking hard is worth the trouble. I work with Wouter Kool and combine EEG, fMRI and computational models.

Before St. Louis I was a postdoc at the University of Göttingen. I did my PhD at Ghent University, with a research stay at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen. I studied psychology and neuroscience in Brescia and Padova.

What I'm curious about

How do we ignore many things at once?Your phone buzzes, someone talks, a car honks. I built a task where people must ignore three distractions at once. It turns out the brain keeps a separate history for each one and quiets each one on its own.

Is it worth the effort?Thinking is costly, and we often avoid it. I study how the brain weighs effort against reward. One finding: simply getting out of a chore feels like a reward.

How does the brain check its own work?Mistakes and surprises leave fast electrical traces at the front of the brain. I use EEG to follow those signals and to see how they change our behavior on the next try.

Reading thoughts in brain wavesWith decoding methods I track, millisecond by millisecond, what the brain is representing. That includes the distractions it is trying to push away.

Building small brains on a computerI write neural network and decision models that copy human behavior, then test whether real brains work the same way.

When motivation runs lowIn depression, learning can be intact while drive is not. I am interested in how motivation and control break down, and in how to measure that.

Selected publications

Reactive suppression of distractor representations resolves multidimensional interference Gheza, Freund, Zalabak & Kool · bioRxiv preprint · 2025
Distractor-specific control adaptation in multidimensional environments Gheza & Kool · Nature Human Behaviour · 2025
Control adaptation through selective suppression of multidimensional distractors Gheza, Zalabak & Kool · Cognitive Computational Neuroscience · 2024
Need for cognition moderates the relief of avoiding cognitive effort Gheza, Kool & Pourtois · PLOS ONE · 2023
Abnormal approach-related motivation but spared reinforcement learning in MDD Gheza, Bakic, Baeken, De Raedt & Pourtois · Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience · 2019
Integration of reward with cost anticipation during performance monitoring Gheza, De Raedt, Baeken & Pourtois · NeuroImage · 2018
Dissociable effects of reward and expectancy during evaluative feedback processing Gheza, Paul & Pourtois · International Journal of Psychophysiology · 2018
TPJ–M1 interaction in the control of shared representations Bardi, Gheza & Brass · NeuroImage · 2017

Teaching

I like making hard methods feel approachable. I have taught EEG time-frequency analysis workshops, a seminar on affective neuroscience (International Max Planck Research School), served as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Computational Cognitive Science at WashU, and supervised graduate and undergraduate research projects.