What influences whether people have fun with a task? Our paper “Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations and success influence enjoyment in video games” with @thecharleywu.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social now in Scientific Reports! rdcu.be/eI069 Paper summary below 1/4

I am hiring PhD students and/or Postdocs, to work on the theory of explainable machine learning. Please apply through Ellis or IMPRS, deadlines end october/mid november. In particular: Women, where are you? Our community needs you!!! imprs.is.mpg.de/application ellis.eu/news/ellis-p...

JOB ALERT: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoc position in Osaka, Japan! Possible start in October 2025 (contact me ASAP), or from April 2026. PLEASE REPOST! #postdocjobs #neuroskyence #neuroscience #psychscisky #compneurosky #neurojobs 1/

🤖 AI that thinks like us Researchers at @www.helmholtz-munich.de have developed Centaur, an artificial intelligence model that can simulate human decision-making with remarkable accuracy. @bethgelab.bsky.social @modirshanechi.bsky.social Read the whole story 👉 bit.ly/4kCi280

An AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) fine-tuned on the results of 60,000 people in psychology experiments shows some real promise in using LLMs for studying and predicting human behavior. It predicts actual human behavior in held-out data & it generalizes to out-of-distribution tasks and experiments.

What an exciting day for cognitive science with a double feature @nature.com including tiny models (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) and less tiny ones (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

What a day. Our foundation model of cognitive science is out in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @marcelbinz.bsky.social's thread: bsky.app/profile/marc... Centaur is featured by the NYT: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/s... We got featured in a Nature views: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Check out our new work on testing the limits of finetuning in improving vlms intuitive physics abilities.

Check out our new preprint in which we propose to use LLMs to generate new cognitive models that minimize scientific regret. This could be a viable approach to query foundation models to advance science more generally.

Preprint update, co-led with @akjagadish.bsky.social, with @marvinmathony.bsky.social, Tobias Ludwig and @ericschulz.bsky.social!

What a sad day for academia all over the world. I was a postdoc at Harvard on a J1 visa. One of my students was going to start his postdoc there in a week. I can only imagine how awful the current situation and uncertainties around it must feel.

🔬 Foundation Models at #HelmholtzMunich drive advances in diagnostics, personalized medicine & cancer research. 👉 Read the full Highlight Story: t1p.de/d209f ✨ Discover more on our Foundation Models page: t1p.de/sx49u #FoundationModels #AI

Our review with @ericschulz.bsky.social about generalization in humans and machines is out now in Current Directions in Psychological Science: doi.org/10.1177/0963... Check it out!

One week left to apply, so please do... 😀

Our paper "Playing repeated games with large language models" just got published in Nature Human Behaviour! We explore how LLMs cooperate, coordinate, and adapt in social dilemmas. Check it out! Work led by @elifakata.bsky.social

yesterday, my postdoc funding (salary and research funds) was cancelled by the National Science Foundation, effective immediately. I received the same generic, vaguely threatening, typo-ridden email as many of my colleagues who have had their awards terminated recently. (1/n)

#AIinScience: Ethical & Practical Challenges 🎤Interview with Dr. Marcel Binz, #HelmholtzMunich, on how Large Language Models are transforming scientific methods & the need of reshaping the scientific mindset: 👉 t1p.de/p82vj @marcelbinz.bsky.social @ericschulz.bsky.social ‬@zeynepakata.bsky.social

At #ICLR2025, #HelmholtzMunich researchers are sharing advancements in #MachineLearning. 👉 t1p.de/8jfgn @fabiantheis.bsky.social @carstenmarr.bsky.social @stes.io @zeynepakata.bsky.social @ericschulz.bsky.social @vincefort.bsky.social @iclr-conf.bsky.social

I had so much fun being a guest on the @behindthescreens.bsky.social podcast! 🤩 If you're curious about how we use games in research (and you understand German), check out their latest episode!

🚨 We're hiring! If you're excited about 🤖 ML/LLMs, 🧠 cognitive science, or 💭 computational psychiatry, come join us in Munich. Two fully funded PhDs @www.helmholtz-munich.de: tailored mentorship, international vibe, lots of room to grow. 📅 May 16th 🔗 hcai-munich.com/PhDHCAI.pdf

🧠 Keeping LLMs factually up to date is a common motivation for knowledge editing. But what would it actually take to support this in practice at the scale and speed the real world demands? We explore this question and really push the limits of lifelong knowledge editing in the wild. 👇

very happy to be presenting this at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

Very grateful to be part of this.

Check out our review on generalization in humans and machines.

When we built the first cognitive foundation model, people said "it's only doing predictions". Here, we are working towards a foundation model of cognitive modeling. We want a tool that can make a useful guess as to what cognitive model, written in python code, could fit the inputted data.

Check out our new work on assessing the limits of finetuning in improving VLMs reasoning abilities.

BAMB! is happening again in 2025. Learn how to model your behavioural data, next to the beach in Barcelona! keynotes this year from @athenaakrami.bsky.social and Peter Dayan.

I've taken @arkrause.bsky.social's course on Probabilistic AI and @jonhue.bsky.social's script remains the most carefully written set of course notes I've encountered during my studies. Glad to see it released to the public! :)

Excited to see our review paper out in Annual Reviews. This paper nicely summarizes years of collaborative efforts working on Gaussian Process based theories of generalization, from function learning over developmental differences to compositionality.

What tech company will be the first to stand up and say that gutting the NSF is bad actually? The economic argument seems pretty clear Less NSF --> fewer PhD students --> fewer researchers --> smaller AI tech pipeline --> slower progress --> less competitive globally

If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word "biased" gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA

Ever wondered why only some memories 🧠 come easily? Our latest work (osf.io/preprints/ps...) led by S. Haridi, with @ericschulz.bsky.social, shows that targeted memory retrieval speeds up with precise semantic and temporal retrieval cues. Hence, crafting cues can give you instant access to memories⚡

Happy to share that our paper is on the cover of @natmachintell.bsky.social! Working on the cover art was a new and fun challenge www.nature.com/natmachintel...

In our latest article, published in @pnas.org and led by @marcelbinz.bsky.social and Stephan Alaniz, we got together four diverse groups of scientists to reflect on how LLMs should affect science. From treating them like co-authors to using other tools instead, many interesting arguments emerged.

Our paper has made the cover of the current issue of nature machine intelligence.

Very happy that our lab got 3 papers accepted at @iclr-conf.bsky.social.

Very happy that our lab got 3 papers accepted at @iclr-conf.bsky.social.

In our latest paper, published in @commspsychol.bsky.social, we show that two types of motifs, projectional and variable, are used by people to enhance memorization of abstract sequences. This work was led by Shuchen Wu and @mirkothm.bsky.social

🚀 Our paper on visual cognition in multimodal large language models is now out in @natmachintell.bsky.social with @lucaschubu.bsky.social, @bethgelab.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social!

Have we built machines that learn and think like people? In our new paper, we find that vision large language models still fall short when it comes to cognitive abilities in the domains of causal reasoning, intuitive physics, and theory of mind. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Preprint alert! We explore 3 exploration tasks, testing if they measure a stable construct & its link to real-world exploration. We find improved robustness of latent factors compared to single-task estimates. With Mirko Thalmann & @ericschulz.bsky.social 🔗https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tzuey

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky 1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research Open Access journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

I wrote an article about my dad's death, and how it affected my views on assisted dying, published in the Times Free version here

Alignment is more than comparing similarity judgments! How well do pretrained neural networks align with humans in few-shot learning settings? Come check our poster #3904 at #NeurIPS on Wednesday to find out

I'm at #NeurIPS to present new work on softly state-invariant world models! We introduce an info bottleneck making world models represent action effects more consistently in latent space, improving prediction and planning! Reach out if you want to meet!

Our work on inductive biases in reinforcement learning is out: tinyurl.com/yfc74e3u By the fantastic @noahedrich.bsky.social Ppl learn faster from slowly changing features; we argue this reflects an inductive bias. Teamwork w @ericschulz.bsky.social & S HallMcMaster #neuroskyence #compneuro

RLDM will be held next year in Dublin! A reminder that the call for workshops is out: rldm.org/call-for-wor... The workshops are one of my favourite parts of the conference :) please get in touch if you have any questions!

We collected lecture notes and blog posts by group members about recent topics in deep learning theory here. Hope it is useful! pehlevan.seas.harvard.edu/resources-0

The video of my talk as the first speaker of the seminar series on the "Cognitive Science of Generative AI" (organized by Ulrike Hahn) is now up online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRX-...