This problem pervades many areas Kozak and Miller 1982 have a great paper on this: "Hypothetical constructs versus intervening variables: A re-appraisal of the three-systems model of anxiety assessment" psycnet.apa.org/record/1983-...

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

🚨 NEW PREPRINT: Multimodal inference through mental simulation. We examine how people figure out what happened by combining visual and auditory evidence through mental simulation. Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps... Code: github.com/cicl-stanfor...

📢 Preprint out! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... What gives rise to probability weighting, a cornerstone of Prospect Theory? We show it comes from the natural boundedness of probabilities + cognitive noise. Adding boundaries adds multiple distortions, across risky choice & perception.

Now out in JEP: General, "How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently" psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... Preprint with final version: osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

📢 New preprint! How do humans learn from arbitrary, abstract goals? We show that, when goal spaces can be compressed, costly working-memory processes give way to internalized reward functions, enabling efficient goal-dependent reinforcement learning. @annecollins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.06810

Out now in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews! When studying language in the brain, we often look for things that can be model systems for language (songbirds, artificial grammars, etc.). Here, we flip this on its head and argue that language itself is an excellent model system for cognition 🗣️🧏‍♀️🧠

"spontaneous thought" is only epistemically spontaneous. once meta-control and offline learning/planning/foraging models improve, I'm looking forward to hearing more about the less sexy but still very important "thought".

check out Jake Russin's new paper on how the interplay between in-context and in-weight learning in neural nets can explain tradeoffs in human learning! pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Hello hivemind! I haven't seen one of these in a while but I know that back-in-the-day they were all the rage: does anyone have a funky spreadsheet of MH/psych/neuro-relevant grants/fellowships for ECRs that they wouldn't mind me sharing with my lab?

A CBT therapist reached out to me for a copy of my paper on planning and anxiety. It's such a rewarding feeling that this computational work reaches therapists, and that it's written in a way that at least for some is inviting!

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄 Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🚨 Want to research the computational & neural mechanisms of planning and its disruption in mental health? If so, join our lab! Here's one prestigious postdoc fellowship that just opened: azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell... reach out w/your CV to [email protected] lab: sharplabbiu.github.io

Work with Pete!

Check out @tifenpan.bsky.social 's just published paper! we demonstrate how to use RNNs to infer latent variables from cognitive models, even when standard methods don't work easily.

This is such a great article! "We also illustrate how to find out whether an effect is practically equivalent to a previously reported effect" we need more of these tests to build a cumulative science!

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

Looking forward to reading and adding to our lab's "offline learning" lit theme!

🧵 New paper! We studied depression symptoms and goal-directed decisions under uncertainty @shiyiliang.bsky.social, with @evanrussek.bsky.social & @robbrutledge.bsky.social Surprisingly, we found that apathy–anhedonia was linked to enhanced goal-directed behavior. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New 📰 Demand characteristics are a fundamental methodological concern in research with humans Yet little is known about the magnitude and consistency of these effects In a new paper, I, M. Wyatt, and @mcxfrank.bsky.social take stock of what we’ve learned via meta-analysis doi.org/10.1525/coll...

If you are around for #CCN2025, come to B71 poster to know more how we (internally) forage for information and how RL can explain it!

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex. rdcu.be/eAofi

Absolutely thrilled to share the 🌟 FIRST PAPER 🌟 from ACORN Lab! 🐿️ I’m beyond proud of all-star grad student @heatherarobinson.bsky.social for this review of “exposome” effects on neurodevelopment & cognition! Paper here rdcu.be/ezUqx & thread below 👇 /1 #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #devsky #cogdev

A great review on how to use tools to *understand* how LLMs learn and produce their output. "Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety A Review" "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.14082

Thrilled to announce that I'll be starting in January 2026 as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York. The lab will study the thought processes that underlie our decision-making.

Excited to be sharing my latest work with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social at #CogSci2025! Learning usually occurs when we encounter new data. But we also have the capacity to reflect on our past experiences. What can we learn from simulating past experience? 📃 cicl.stanford.edu/papers/yang2... 1/

New from the lab with J. Brochard & P. Dayan: Theoretical review on #criticalintelligence: How to make rapid decisions with utmost precision when under threat. We identify computational challenges, candidate solutions & cognitive experiments to disambiguate them www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Some similarities matter, others don’t—a great Labatut book with a yellow cover means books by Labatut are good, not yellow books are good. Factorized representations support such selective generalization. Check out our study on select. gen. by Sam HallMcMaster in collab with @gershbrain.bsky.social

Another super cool piece of work from one of my fav planning researchers!

Neither in my view. I never saw the nomological net as a good guide for our philosophy of science. I preferred Bechtel's mechanistic approach. A mechanism for "memory" might have units And operations at various levels that at the time of measurement dont correlate with the higher level output. (1/n)

🌵🏜️🌵 New preprint! How do people learn from ambiguous feedback, like whether someone is laughing *with* you 😆 or *at* you 😏? A very fun collab w/ the brilliant @rbhui.bsky.social A brief thread...👇 📖 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Since @markkho.bsky.social's seminal work, I've been wondering how we build task construals under uncertainty, given I think it bears on explaining chronic worry (www.cell.com/trends/cogni.... Here, @davidnagy.bsky.social @thecharleywu.bsky.social et al tackle how we do so arxiv.org/abs/2507.16511

How does our own curiosity to read novel scientific content contribute to an implicit practice of favoring breadth over depth of research in the projects the field pursues? How does this hinder our effort to build a cumulative science? How is this transmitted in culture (including publishers)? 🤔💭

Mental Sampling in Preferential Choice: Tracing the Process using Random Generation: https://osf.io/kzmb5

🚨 Fully Funded PhD positions Gonda Brain Institute, Sharp Lab We will explore how people build and deploy world models efficiently for planning and decision making. We will also seek to characterize how world models construal and use is biased in anxiety. Deadline: 1 Sept 2025. Please share!

I just presented our lab's work on task categorization (biased in anxiety), where Ps infer the latent task category of a new task. Ps are trained by labelling latent tasks, i, w/ p(s'|s,a)_i This paper goes in-depth into this larger topic - looking forward to reading! www.arxiv.org/abs/2507.12821

Online Now: Looking deeper into the algorithms underlying human planning

I wrote an entry on Transformers for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (‪@oecs-bot.bsky.social‬). I had to work with a tight word limit, but I hope it's useful as a short introduction for students and researchers who don't work on machine learning: oecs.mit.edu/pub/ppxhxe2b

2 hours after I'm delighted to announce I've won a 5 year grant through the Bereshit ISF program. This large grant for new and returning scientists provides around 200 k per year to fund our work and talented students (PhD and postdoc). Official ads will be out soon! 🥂 🥂 🥂

What an awesome #CPConf2025! If you're interested in funded PhD or PostDoc opportunities (remote possible) do reach out ([email protected]). we have exciting new paradigms modelling planning, meta- control, offline learning, and their relation to psychopathology. See: Sharplabbiu.github.io

#CPConf2025 looking forward to seeing you at our symposium tomorrow on cognitive map biases across psychopathology. The design choice is a combination of first-year PI + addressing post-lunch fatigue. Here you go...! with the inimitable @mgarvert.bsky.social, @carocharp.bsky.social & Matt Nour.

Modern theories of emotion (especially “interoceptive inference”) often cite William James as a key inspiration. But what did James actually say about emotion, and is it supported by the data? Here’s a brief look at the core arguments and classic evidence. 🧵

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

So excited for #CPConf2025 @ Tubingen! Analyzing my new lab's data as we speak, and we've found replication! I'll show how people generalize transition dynamics to plan in novel task environments and how this is disrupted by prior learning under threat in folks with anxiety (cog & somatic)

🚨New preprint! WHEN should we plan toward a goal? Most research focuses on how and where to plan, but the timing of planning initiation has been overlooked. We show humans leverage a cognitive map - called model-based meta-control - to learn when to deploy a plan. 🧵(1/15) osf.io/preprints/ps...

🎈 Out now: 🎈 "The capacity limits of moving objects in the imagination" (by Balaban & me) of interest to people thinking about the imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, capacity limits, and more www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

In psychotherapy, treatment expectations matter. But even more powerful? ➡️ How they change over time. Our new paper shows that updating expectations during psychotherapy for MDD predicts depression outcomes. 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WRBWU... #depression #psychotherapy #beliefupdating

All should agree about innocent Israelis & Iranians caught in this insanity. Implying destroying imminent Iran nukes is wrong is wrong too. I've lived through ballistic missiles targeting Tel Aviv civilians (image of today's TLV hit). Now imagine that with a nuke. It's different living through it.

Very rough night- A missile hit a house in Tamra (Arab town in the north)- 4 family members killed. Direct hits in Bat Yam and Rehovot (center). 6 killed in Bat Yam, including two children. 7 people are unaccounted for. About 200 injured, including at least 6 in serious condition.