Eike buabang

My primary research interest is the cognitive neuroscience of habits. I am particularly interested in understanding why people engage in behaviours that are against their explicit beliefs and goals. These behaviours range in severity from everyday action slips (e.g., entering an old password), to impulsive or poorly planned behaviours (e.g., eating unhealthy foods), and on the extreme, compulsive behaviours (e.g., feeling unable to control substance-use or checking doors or locks repetitively).

I joined the Gillan Lab in September 2022 as Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the project “Making and Breaking a Habit”. In this project, I research the underlying mental and neural representations of habits, and explore everyday and clinical applications.

I completed my PhD at KU Leuven in Belgium supervised by Prof. Agnes Moors, and co-supervised by Prof. Jan De Houwer and Prof. Marcel Brass. In my dissertation “the role of goal-directed processes in the causation of seemingly habitual behaviour”, I investigated and formalised goal-directed accounts of behaviours that we typically consider habitual.

Email: eike.buabang@tcd.ie