We are hiring 11 Doctoral Researchers (100%) in the DFG-RTG "The Experience of Stories in the Digital Age". Uni Wuerzburg, Germany. Disciplines: Communication, Psychology, Computer Science. Topics: VR / XR, storytelling robots, influencers, misinformation. More: go.uniwue.de/rtg3087jobs Please share

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio. led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓ #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

Excited to share new work with @hleemasson.bsky.social , Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and @lisik.bsky.social! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: osf.io/b5p4n 1/n

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ? Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

📢 Now accepted at Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 🤩 Our proposal offers a framework for understanding how fundamental regulatory sensations, such as boredom & effort, shape temporal experience through interoceptive mechanisms. Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... TL;DR: Check 🧵 below

Do you ever wish you could just use python to pull together the files and code for running FSL's randomise? Me too! I made this: github.com/jmumford/ran... It will even replace the numbers in the file outputs with contrast names of your choosing (and replace corrp with 1minusp).

Awesome new preprint from @jasonleng.bsky.social! Deadlines in decision making often truncate too-slow responses. Failing to account for these omissions can (severely) bias your DDM parameter estimates. They offer a great solution to correct for this issue. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

📢 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

Excited to share joint work with Ulf Hahnel and @sgluth.bsky.social on investigating how attribute translations - a widely implemented behavior intervention - lead to more ecological consumer choices. Main results are below, but check out our preprint 👇 www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

My pre-PhD work with @noham-wolpe.bsky.social is finally out! doi.org/10.1037/mot0000411 How does progress feedback influence effort-based decision-making? Our study involved a novel effort manipulation designed for online testing and mouse-tracking. The results came with a twist on apathy… (🧵1/3)

New paper our in @pnas.org, lead by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social with Léo Sperber. We use evolutionary simulation to assess and compare the adaptive value of positivity bias and gradual perseveration in reinforcement learning. Follow the thread below (and Isabelle!) for more details!

🧠 We're hiring a computational postdoc! 3+ years with me & @mitulamehta.bsky.social on @wellcometrust.bsky.social funded social cognition/paranoia research at the IoPPN. Lead & develop computational work, collaborate with experimentalists on psychosis/THC data. DM for details! lnkd.in/eCMy9Jf5

🚨 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

New preprint! We are pleased to share our Hierarchical Bayesian framework for Interoceptive Psychophysics! Implemented in rstan, we provide a complete suite of tools spanning model comparison, parameter recovery, multifactor designs, power analysis, and more! 🎯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So happy to see this work out! 🥳 Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰 Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩‍🔬

New paper from my group led by Odd Jacobson, former PhD student & current postdoc @livingingroups.bsky.social : How do animal groups simultaneously balance between- and within-group competition in dynamic environments and does this impact movement and space use? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Preprint⭐ Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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

In this article, Maier et al. show that metacognitive learning from consequences can shape moral decision-making. @maxmaier.bsky.social @vancityreynolds.bsky.social @vanessachg.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨Out in PNAS🚨 with @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social Punishment, even when intended to teach norms and change minds for the good, may backfire. Our computational cognitive model explains why! Paper: tinyurl.com/yc7fs4x7 News: tinyurl.com/3h3446wu 🧵

A computational approach to disentangling the triggers of curiosity in children and adults: https://osf.io/tp5ce

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 review out on facial signalling in conversation, making the argument that the notion of ‘speech acts’ is outdated due to its unimodal focus, especially in the light of the fundamental contributions of the face towards social action communication www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning. Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

🥳Excited to share that our new paper is live at Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social! We show that Pavlovian learning can grow empathy for another person. 🧵👇

A new study by Johnson & Obradovich explores whether large language models generate completions that simulate altruistic behaviour in the dictator game, and how they respond to different prompts and parameters.

Empathy in Explanation: https://osf.io/frp2w

Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro

Are the brain's representational formats predetermined by its intrinsic architecture, or are they efficiently tuned to the statistical structure of the visual world? In our new study, we test these possibilities. So proud of this fantastic and inspiring work, led by @jazzmaniatico.bsky.social.

The individual, relational and societal costs of striving to feel good Review by Brett Q. Ford Web: go.nature.com/44LVyN4 PDF: rdcu.be/exQoL #psychscisky #psychology

This study disentangled loss avoidance from loss aversion, across 7 experiments using social dilemmas with gains and losses. People increased or decreased their cooperation to avoid losses. There was no consistent evidence for loss aversion. @bjks.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Paper on effortful leisure led by @aidanvcampbell.bsky.social with @minzlicht.bsky.social and myself now out! (www.nature.com/articles/s44...). Effort is aversive and often avoided, yet here we find effortful tasks and activities are also more meaningful, and effortful leisure is no less enjoyable.

Led by @hanjabrrr.bsky.social, @damienfarine.bsky.social, and I, we combined ECG and GPS tracking from a whole group of vulturine guineafowl to show that collective movements, and especially attempting to lead under disagreement greatly increased Heart Rates. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thrilled that our paper on the mechanisms underlying social learning strategies is out! First big paper from my @erc.europa.eu & @kawresearch.bsky.social funded group. More to come! I'm currently looking to recruit two post docs, get in touch if you find this line of research interesting.

🚨 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!

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"! Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For any postdocs who are are looking to transition to independence and might be keen to join us here at @kingsioppn.bsky.social, King's Prize fellowship applications are open (deadline 27 Nov) 👇 See link for details, and feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/119505-...

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

🚨New paper in PAIN w/ R. Gopalakrishnan, @torwager.bsky.social, @mcgill.ca Mathieu Roy, et al. Neurophysiological encoding of aversive prediction errors. journals.lww.com/pain/fulltex... @theneuro.bsky.social

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

I'm hiring 2+ 2.5-year postdocs over the next few months. Job 1: looking for someone with deep expertise in computational modelling (reinforcement learning, agent based modelling) on real-world/complex data (closing: 18 August, starting: October-December), www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/52059/

High social aloofness was linked to reduced exploration, lower decision noise, and high choice stickiness in a bandit task. These effects reflect habitual and outcome-driven behaviours, linking social disengagement to nonsocial decision flexibility. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Altered Decision-Making Across Acute and Chronic Pain States: A Bias Towards Context-Dependent Valuations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.09.663993v1

Biological profits of irrational computations in the orbitofrontal cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.10.664081v1

🎉New paper out @Psychological Review on the neuroscience of intergroup contact🎉 Led by the fantastic @margaretrwelte.bsky.social ‬and Jas Cloutier! @apajournals.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social @sansmeeting.bsky.social #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #AcademicSky psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...