How does the excitement of doing science shift as you do it more and more?

The Finish Line Moves

New For the Love of Science vlog

youtu.be/je_vgNlr0q4

New blog post: The Phylogenetics of Artifacts — inferring the evolution of cultural objects, artificial life forms, and language models.

From cat genetics to ancient myths to LLMs. 🧬 1/n

Public communication alters private confidence Andreassen et al. demonstrate that confidence exhibited in public affects our private assessment of confidence.

How does uncertainty transmit from one head to another? Our new paper out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social reveals how public communication alters private confidence.

w/ Einar Andreassen & @cdfrith.bsky.social

@birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social
@leverhulme.ac.uk

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Congrats to @georgiaturner.bsky.social and you!

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

OSF

How does social influence shape collective outcomes? When does it lead to lock-in on inferior options?

In our 🚨 new preprint 📝 osf.io/preprints/so... we make three contributions

w/ @alexgelas.bsky.social Alex Jochim @leostnbrk.bsky.social Peter Steiglechner & @pantelispa.bsky.social

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Come work with us! And get in touch with any questions you might have about the position, our labs or living/working in Germany #PostdocWanted

OSF

New preprint available about combinatorial invention!

Reconstructing Combinatorial Inventions Through Design Problem Analysis osf.io/preprints/ps...

**Postdoc position in human category learning**

@thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social.

www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

OSF

New preprint!!
Culture sets us apart: Cultural evolution as a solution to the challenges of social relationships osf.io/preprints/so...
Where I discuss how chatbots, washing machines, festivals and other cultural innovations offset costs, reduce friction and substitute social relationships.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at University of Birmingham Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share!
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

Why does a worse candidate win? Or an inferior song dominate?

New article with @alexgelas.bsky.social, @pantelispa.bsky.social & Gaël Le Mens.

We show that often once A becomes even slightly more popular than B, people choose A much more often.

www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In today's modeling class I had a lot of fun trying to reconduce a bunch of different models to the update rule from rescorla wagner :-)

it turns out that - at least for RL, bayesian update, kalman filters and hierarchically gaussian filters - it's "all" in the learning rate definition.

These tools are only available if Qualtrics (and prolific task builder, whatever that is?) is used for data collection? Ie not typically used platforms like Psychopy.

Here’s Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely asking Jeffrey Epstein for “the name and email of the redhead that was here with you.” This is four years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉

We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

or rather, we tested whether social feedback on social media is rewarding, following operant principles.

"Social media is like a Skinner box" is a phrase I've heard repeated a lot, but never meaningfully engaged with. We try and do so in this preprint.

Behaviorist principles are very useful to understanding digital behavior, but work in this area tends not to be aware of them. So, we provide a primer.

A computational reward learning account of social media engagement - Nature Communications Despite the popularity of social media, the psychological processes that drive people to engage in it remain poorly understood. The authors applied a computational modeling approach to data from multi...

Nice! We directly tested this idea some years ago, might be relevant citation www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reward as drive reduction, the return!

This opinion piece on the explanatory and unifying power of the homeostatic reinforcement learning framework is amazingly accessible, despite its technical nature, and extremely insightful 👏

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution Abstract. The societal effects of children’s learning in cultural evolution have been underexplored. Here, we investigate using agent-based models how a pr

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Infinite hidden Markov models can dissect the complexities of learning - Nature Neuroscience Bruijns et al. present a modeling tool that enables the tracking of learning dynamics across subjects to reveal how behaviors emerge and adapt. Applying the tool to a decision-making task in mice unco...

New in Nature Neuroscience: We developed a flexible model that reveals how animals learn tasks—uncovering stages, sudden insights, and gradual improvements unique to each animal.
Learning isn't monotonic, and our model captures that complexity 🐭📊
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I watched this on my own, sort of loved it at the end.

📖Published!

STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission

This framework can be used to infer complex transmission rules🖥️ 🧪

Read more:

🎉 📣Join today at 1pm GMT to learn about ESLR and get involved!

Simulation-based inference with deep learning suggests speed climbers combine innovation and copying to improve performance Abstract. In the Olympic sport of speed climbing, athletes compete to reach the top of a 15 m wall as quickly as possible. Since the standardization of the

Proc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗‍♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

Infinite hidden Markov models can dissect the complexities of learning - Nature Neuroscience Bruijns et al. present a modeling tool that enables the tracking of learning dynamics across subjects to reveal how behaviors emerge and adapt. Applying the tool to a decision-making task in mice unco...

On a more positive note, this NN is worth a read. It takes a similar approach to Ashwood, Calhoun etc to explore diff behavioral states using HMM, but here using a hierarchical Dirichlet process to infer number of states www.nature.com/articles/s41...