Shahidullah Dost '26 is majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Neuroscience. His research focuses on the conditions under which individuals adopt different learning strategies in social networks. Using computational models, Shahi explores how environmental factors, such as network size, connectivity, uncertainty, and attentional cues shape belief updating. His work also examines how attention biases influence information-seeking, with implications for belief formation in settings like social media, political discourse, and education. With support from the Coulter Scholarship, Shahi spent his junior fall as a visiting researcher at UCLA's Izquierdo Lab, where he investigated the neural mechanisms of flexible decision-making. Driven by a curiosity about how we adapt choices over time, he designed a behavioral task in which rats learned to associate shapes and spatial locations with rewards. These experiments were paired with brain interventions, including targeted inactivation and calcium imaging, to identify the neural circuits involved. Shahi also applied machine learning tools to track behavior from video, automating movement analysis. Working directly with animals and data gave him a clearer sense of how computational ideas play out in the brain, and reinforced his interest in studying how behavior, brain activity, and belief formation all intersect.
Faculty mentor: Alireza Soltani, PSYC
