🚨Now out in Science Advances @science.org: #Parkinson's patients off dopamine medication (PD-) explore too much and exploit too little. Modeling shows they overvalue uncertainty, not that they choose randomly. On levodopa (PD+) they become comparable to controls www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇

Dopamine depletion in Parkinson’s increases directed but not random exploration

Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.

science.org

🚨 Out now in TICS How can language models help cognitive science? @ruimata.bsky.social & I outline 5 uses: mapping research fields, formalizing theories, cleaning up constructs & measures, predicting behavior across tasks, and capturing environmental variation. 🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

New Study! @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social Often foraging models assume that the forager knows the environment and proceed to predict decision strategies but how does the foraging learn the structure of the environment ? A new preprint delves into this question

New blog post! Odds ratios are...a bit weird. Here I explain two problems (interpretation, non-collapsibility) and provide some simple recommendations for improved reporting. www.the100.ci/2026/07/30/r...

Reviewer notes: Odds ratios are really odd

When psychological researchers investigate binary outcomes, they routinely report odds ratios to quantify the strength of an effect or an association. This is quite understandable given that psycholog...

the100.ci

Out now in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Thank you to all peers and colleagues who provided invaluable feedback during the process!

A demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning | PNAS

We develop a demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning that formalizes our understanding of when and why individuals should preferent...

pnas.org

Alejandro Pérez Velilla@apvelilla.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New preprint with @psmaldino.bsky.social on the evolution of similarity-biased learning: osf.io/preprints/so... This mathematical treatment both simplifies and extends our previous simulation treatment of the subject: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A Demographic Theory of Similarity-Biased Social Learning. Now out in PNAS, led by the incomparable @apvelilla.bsky.social . We use modeling to explore conditions for the (cultural) evolution of parochial (and anti-parochial) learning biases. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🍄 New paper out in PLOS Computational Biology! 🍄 I, and others, have previously drawn a comparison between the classic “cost-avoidance” argument for social learning and the central idea of resource rationality... (1/8)

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates

Humans adapt learning rates on both a fast and a slow time scale, and the central orbitofrontal cortex may represent the slow time scale.

doi.org

Join our online @eslr.bsky.social skill-sharing session by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social this Thursday, 4PM CET to learn more about Bayesian likelihood free inference. Details below 👇

ESLR@eslr.bsky.social · 3w ago

🚨 ESLR Workshop coming up next week! 🗓 July 23, 2026 ⏰ 4pm CET Online Using bayesflow for likelihood free inferences by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social 🔗 Join at: calendar.app.google/RKMwxPeaGveM...

Want to do a PhD to work on models of opinion dynamics and the inequalities of information flow, with an emphasis on climate change and climate policy? Apply by October 15 to work with Ago Merico and myself, based at @leibniz-zmt.de in Bremen, Germany. www.leibniz-zmt.de/en/vacancies...

Doctoral candidate (gn) - WG Systems Ecology

Das Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung (ZMT) erforscht tropische und subtropische Küstenökosysteme und ihre Bedeutung für Natur und Menschen erforscht.

leibniz-zmt.de

Doing a short workshop about simulation-based inference on Thursday for @eslr.bsky.social! Come hang out :)

ESLR@eslr.bsky.social · 3w ago

🚨 ESLR Workshop coming up next week! 🗓 July 23, 2026 ⏰ 4pm CET Online Using bayesflow for likelihood free inferences by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social 🔗 Join at: calendar.app.google/RKMwxPeaGveM...

out today! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Chaz Firestone@chazfirestone.bsky.social · last mo.

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

🚨 ESLR Workshop coming up next week! 🗓 July 23, 2026 ⏰ 4pm CET Online Using bayesflow for likelihood free inferences by @masonyoungblood.bsky.social 🔗 Join at: calendar.app.google/RKMwxPeaGveM...

Turns out that 2-choice tasks strongly underestimate the natural relationships between accuracy, confidence, and RT. This is true both in simulations and empirical data. See our new preprint. osf.io/preprints/ps...

💥After 3 full days, it's a wrap for our early career workshop for the study of social behaviour and evolution in Greece! A huge thank you to all our brilliant participants for coming, to @biologists.bsky.social for making it possible, and HCMR for hosting us!

Learning from the most successful people makes sense? We show that social learning, and especially payoff bias, is bad when choice outcomes are dependent on prior success💰 As such "rich-get-richer" dynamics are everywhere, this shows fundamental boundary conditions for the benefits of SL!

Paul Bergmann@pkbergmann.bsky.social · 4w ago

New preprint with @dominikdeffner.bsky.social: While social learning is broadly adaptive when repeated decision outcomes are independent, we show that when outcomes depend on prior success, most social learning strategies deteriorate performance and increase inequality: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/7

New preprint with @dominikdeffner.bsky.social: While social learning is broadly adaptive when repeated decision outcomes are independent, we show that when outcomes depend on prior success, most social learning strategies deteriorate performance and increase inequality: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/7

How do people build new ideas from existing knowledge? By tracking Wikipedia searches, we found that novel ideas emerged when people balanced exploration with exploitation—alternating between distant topics and deep dives into related information.

💫📢 Couldn't be more excited to finally kick-off SWARM-E and bring our collective behaviour communities together 🤩 A huge thank you to @zif-bielefeld.bsky.social for the trust & support 🙏 More details coming soon 👇

Andrew King@shoalgroup.bsky.social · 4w ago

We have funding for SWARM-E, a long-term group at @zif-bielefeld.bsky.social! I'll be leading with co-leads @marinapapa.bsky.social @joefresna.bsky.social to better understand collective behaviour across biological and artificial systems. First workshop 2027... www.shoalgroup.org/swarm More soon!

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

Happy to have contributed to the latest HBES newsletter on our recent paper, The Meanings and Dividends of Man the Hunter, led by @vivek123.bsky.social I reflect on MTH through the lens of my research on Bayaka women's foraging & cooperation in the Congolese rainforest www.hbes.com/revisiting-m...

Revisiting Man the Hunter - HBES

– by Haneul Jang For decades, the phrase Man the Hunter has occupied a central place in discussions of human evolution. Today, however, the phrase sounds outdated, evoking a familiar image of men hunt...

hbes.com

🚨 Now out in PNAS In decision research, "talk is cheap." We show it isn't. Using LLMs to analyze participants' free-text explanations of their choices, we find verbal reports are a rich, scalable window into how people actually decide. 🔗 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Led by Kamil Fulawka

This is cultural suicide and intellectual vandalism. In an era where humanities-illiterate tech bros have unearned god-like powers, we need historians, philosophers, ethicists, classicists more than ever.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou@proffrancesca.bsky.social · last mo.

I’d love it if you’d sign this. It might not prevent me and my colleagues losing our jobs, but it will draw attention to the ideological vandalism being perpetrated by the wealthy execs running our university. Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter - sign the petition below! c.org/NpvY4sR9gH

AUTOMATING COMPUTATIONAL REPRODUCIBILITY My colleague @philipjakobbln.bsky.social and I are currently engaged in a research project where we reproduce scientific results en masse. To that end, we built rigor.me, a platform for automatically reproducing papers using agents 🧵

Sharing our latest endeavour here. How reproducible is your paper? @philipjakobbln.bsky.social and I built rigor.me to ease the burden of computational reproducibility. If you provide a paper, data and code, we execute it and tell you what works (and what fails). Beta is available now: rigor.me

RigorLabs@rigorlabs.bsky.social · last mo.

AUTOMATING COMPUTATIONAL REPRODUCIBILITY My colleague @philipjakobbln.bsky.social and I are currently engaged in a research project where we reproduce scientific results en masse. To that end, we built rigor.me, a platform for automatically reproducing papers using agents 🧵

✨🚨 @ehbea.bsky.social IS GOING GLOBAL🚨✨ #EHBEA2028 will be a fully online global event, opening the door for those who have rarely/never been able to attend. We’re looking for volunteers at all career stages and levels of involvement. 👉 forms.office.com/e/vCT8Dqk1Mp Please share widely 🫶

New paper with Ángel Jiménez, @keith-jensen.bsky.social, Lei Chang and Hui Jing Lu Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Limited evidence that reputation-based partner choice facilitates information sharing in humans

Abstract. A necessary prerequisite for the accumulation of beneficial knowledge, or ‘cumulative cultural evolution’, is the sharing of information via soci

royalsocietypublishing.org

excited about this one: using longitudinal movement data and dyadic models, we show that orangutan moms adjust their ranging patterns so their kids can play with age-mates independent of kinship, at personal costs. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Look how far we've come in just a few years! We're fast as well! It turns out, recruiting reviewers is much easier when they're not being used as free labor for massively profitable publishers Support free-to-publish and Open Access science by submitting to Open Mind today! direct.mit.edu/opmi

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

my group is looking for a HiWi (student assistant) to help transcribe narrative interviews for our project on Inuit health and well-being. Must be a student enrolled in a bachelor or master's program at a German University. Link here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

eva.mpg.de