Dr. Slimane Dridi

I'm generally interested in how evolution has shaped the cognitive abilities of humans and other social species. My thesis is more specifically dedicated to the theoretical modeling of the evolution of learning behaviors in social interactions. I'm interested in the case where the genes prescribe the learning rule (i.e. the specific cognitive mechanism by which an individual learns) used by an animal. The questions I try to answer are: what is the evolutionarily stable learning rule when individuals of a population interact socially in games? What happens when these social environments fluctuate? Should the evolutionarily stable learning rule be cognitively sophisticated or more simple?

I'm also interested in the question of bounded rationality in game theory: why people should or should not play optimally in games? And how can we explain departures from optimality observed in economics experiments?


Biophore - CH-1015 Lausanne
Tel. +41 21 692 41 60
Fax +41 21 692 41 65