Dr. Mustafa Yavuz

Personal information

I am a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences, LMU Munich. My work lies at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and philosophy of mind. I study how perception and decision-making are shaped by social context, with a particular focus on shared perception, collective decisions, metacognition, and face-to-face interactions in humans.

Research interests

• Social cognition
• Perception and decision-making
• Collective intelligence
• Joint and interactive decision-making
• Social influence

Current projects

My doctoral research investigates how social context shapes human perception and decision-making. Across different experimental paradigms, I examine how individual and collective decisions are influenced by the presence of others, shared access to information, verbal communication, and uncertainty.
A central aim of my work is to understand how cognitive processes that are often studied at the individual level change when they occur in social or interactive contexts. I approach this question using behavioural experiments, computational modelling, EEG, pupillometry, and analyses of verbal interaction. I am also interested in how people cognitively represent artificial agents and tools, and how these representations influence expectations, judgments, and decision processes.

Selected publications

• Yavuz, M., Esmaily, J., Bahrami, B., & Deroy, O. (2026). Covert neural and autonomic signatures of shared perception. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 21(1), nsag009. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsag009
• Yavuz, M., Sayahpour, S., Bahrami, B., & Deroy, O. (2025). Human pairs show collective benefit in olfactory perception despite individual differences and verbal limits. iScience, 29(1), 114535. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.114535
• Yavuz, M., Bonicalzi, S., Schmitz, L., Battich, L., Esmaily, J., & Deroy, O. (2025). Rational choices elicit stronger sense of agency in brain and behavior. Cognition, 257, 106062. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106062
• Yavuz, M., Gökçe Doğu, E., & Bahrami, B. (2025). Exploration-exploitation dilemma in joint value-based decisions is driven by resistance to erratic randomness. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cp8uy_v2