Pradyumna Sepulveda Delgado

Columbia University (USA)

Toward a neuro-computational account of context-dependent visual aesthetic experience

2024–2025: Fall & Spring

Pradyumna Sepulveda is a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive neuroscience focusing on human decision-making. He obtained a Biotech Engineering degree and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Chile. Moving towards neuroscience, Pradyumna completed an MSc in Neuroscience at King’s College London and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Recently, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Pradyumna’s research has explored decision-making and its interaction with goals and contexts. His work combines neuroscience and computational tools to understand the behavioral and neural flexibility in choices made by healthy and clinical populations. Aesthetic decisions hold a unique position and challenge since they may combine individual subjective tastes with universal concepts and commonalities. Further, the value assigned to an aesthetic experience may also be dynamic and prone to be updated by experience and personal goals. At the Academy, he will study how contextual information can affect the value of visual aesthetic experiences. For this, he will use computational models to reveal the integration of multiple visual features to construct individual preferences. He will also track attention and brain dynamics that could reveal mechanisms behind aesthetic value computation.