First study out! Using a new cooperative paradigm and multi-agent inverse RL, we show that mice spontaneously adopt leader/follower roles, and the prefrontal cortex encodes these role dynamics and an egocentric social value map of the partner’s position. (1/3) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Asymmetric prefrontal representations for leader–follower dynamics - Nature

Mice spontaneously form leader and follower roles during cooperation, and the medial prefrontal cortex encodes these role dynamics and an egocentric social value map of the partner’s position.

nature.com

🔥🔥New paper alert! Super excited to share our paper, out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the wonderful Dr. Nofar Mizrachi! nature.com/articles/s41... To me, this finding fundamentally changes how we should think about the relationship between cognition and immune regulation:

Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans - Nature Human Behaviour

Mizrachi et al. show that directing attention to bodily sensations, rather than away, promotes more regulated acute inflammatory responses in healthy volunteers, revealing sensory and vagal pathways l...

nature.com

I love the little art surprises you get sometimes when plotting 2D data

📢Preprint alert! In recent years, a lot of effort has been put into developing machine-learned models of road user behaviour, mainly motivated by use cases in automated driving - but what if we instead put these models to use to predict road safety in human traffic? 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2606.12500

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned roa...

arxiv.org

I had a great time, thanks a lot @rodmurraysmith.bsky.social and team for inviting me. A lovely community and a lovely event - I’ll be back!

Sebastian Stein@ssteinresearch.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The S3CIX Symposium and Summer School on Computational Interaction is kicking off with a great keynote by Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social @s3cix.bsky.social

Really looking forward to this event - thanks for the invite!

S³CIX Summer School and Symposium on Computational Interaction@s3cix.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The S3CIX Symposium and Summer School has some exciting Keynote Speakers: s3cix.computationalinteraction.org/speakers/#ke... Gustav Markkula, Kasper Hornbæk, Katja Hofmann, Mohamed Chetouani! @markkula.bsky.social @khornbaek.bsky.social @katjahofmann.bsky.social

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Currently experiencing a quantum superposition of joy and grief: I know that the decision about my funding application has been made, but I am yet to be informed of the outcome 🎉😭🧪

all academic applications should have consolation prizes. doesn’t have to be much, like a mug that says “i applied for leverhulme 2020” or a t-shirt “UKRI reject 2023”

🚨 New paper at #NeurIPS2025! A systematic fixation-level comparison of a performance-optimized DNN scanpath model and a mechanistic cognitive model reveals behaviourally relevant mechanisms that can be added to the mechanistic model to substantially improve performance. 🧵👇

Received sort of promising reviews for a grant, so there’s a small chance I’ll have some positive news by Christmas, and suddenly I find myself *very* capable of empathising with my 10yo when he’s obsessing and anxious over whether he’ll get his wishes from Santa 🎅😱🧪

a child is crying while sitting on santa 's lap .

ALT: a child is crying while sitting on santa 's lap .

media.tenor.com

🥳 Cool new paper by Siwei Ma, where evidence acc models and EEG data tell the same story: the effects of being cognitively loaded while deciding whether to cross the street can be understood as making us less sensitive to the available perceptual evidence 🧪🧠📈 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨Preprint! Yueyang Wang is bringing his human behaviour modelling out of the VR lab, showing that by constraining deep multi-agent RL with human-like perceptual and motor limitations, a very small real-world dataset is sufficient to outperform a behaviour cloning baseline arxiv.org/abs/2510.27383

Realistic pedestrian-driver interaction modelling using multi-agent RL with human perceptual-motor constraints

Modelling pedestrian-driver interactions is critical for understanding human road user behaviour and developing safe autonomous vehicle systems. Existing approaches often rely on rule-based logic, gam...

arxiv.org

It is my pleasure to share that in 2028, we will be hosting the 9th International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP9). Exciting times ahead, we can’t wait to welcome you! @markkula.bsky.social, @hfs-its-leeds.bsky.social, @envleeds.bsky.social, @universityofleeds.bsky.social

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

nature.com

New publication 📢 "Testing the Validity of Multiparticipant Distributed Simulation for Understanding and Modeling Road User Interaction" led by Amir Hossein Kalantari together with Yi-Shin Lin, Ali Mohammadi, Natasha Merat OBE, and @markkula.bsky.social. Access: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...

I love this experience-sampling study on the absolute pitch of earworms! It's a really nicely done study conducted in everyday settings. The link to this paper (open access) is provided below. It is also featured in a podcast (tinyurl.com/4ydrw5zp) by the Psychonomic Society. Congrats!

Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

Memory for isolated absolute pitches is extremely rare in Western, English-speaking populations. However, past research has found that people can voluntarily reproduce well-known songs in the original...

link.springer.com

Psychonomic Society@psychonomicsociety.bsky.social · last yr.

The Psychonomic Society is pleased to announce that Matthew G. Evans has been honored with the 2025 Best Article Award for AP&P. Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition. Read the paper here: bit.ly/3HnnZYC #psynomAPP linkedin.com/in/mattgilevans

Oh so it does have phd level intelligence

Victor Shammas@victorshammas.com · last yr.

Google Gemini doesn’t appear to be doing too well: ‘"I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes . . . I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe," the bot continued.’

When your city has an open data portal with the location of every tree, you can do this:

Between two trees: Vancouver man maps more than 2,600 places to hang a hammock

He had the idea while hanging in a hammock.

vancouverisawesome.com

i wrote about what it feels like to live in the collapse of the american empire "a flake of shale in a great upheaval of the earth" buttondown.com/theswordandt...

Writing into the Wreck

I, for one, never asked to live in a collapsing empire. The feeling of what you thought to be solid ground turning to a shower of scree under your feet, the...

buttondown.com

I am privileged to announce the publication of the Anti-Autocracy Handbook: sks.to/autocracy 1/12

I’ve never been fully into neither chess nor boxing, but I’ve just learned of the existence of what seems like the perfect sport so now maybe I have to! Invented by Enki Bilal no less en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_b...

Chess boxing - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

Best of Dying Twitter@bestofdyingtwit.bsky.social · last yr.

“In light of the President's statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately”

Willie Brown Middle School is a San Francisco 6-8 in the Bayview District. For the entire ‘24-‘25 school year, I have been driving the 44 O’Shaughnessy bus that stops there right after school gets out. That trip has been the busiest and most challenging part of my working day.

Excited to present our study in ‪@natneuro.nature.com‬: a deep brain pathway that triggers safety-driven movement—overriding needs like finding food or social contacts. A look into how the brain weighs deep instincts. Congrats to all and first author @nkrauth.bsky.social. shorturl.at/toYFN

A hypothalamus–brainstem circuit governs the prioritization of safety over essential needs - Nature Neuroscience

Animals need to adapt behavior to balance survival with fulfillment of essential needs. Krauth et al. identify neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that, when activated, prioritize survival over other ...

shorturl.at

New Substack post It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

Happy In Theory

This is the short story of my long, 20 year search for a stable academic home. There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending.

thomscottphillips.substack.com

Haha the reverse mullet theory of academic publishing

Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · last yr.

Business in the front party in the back? More like party in the abstract business in supplementary section 5; please read all 200 pages instead of forming your opinion just based on the abstract we wrote.

Great post, and can definitely be read as film noir voiceover in places

Eric Kernfeld@ekernf01.bsky.social · last yr.

Apparently, transcriptomics is not the only field struggling with overly optimistic results from new deep learning techniques. www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fool...

If you’re not reading Talia Lavin’s wonderful series about sandwiches, you should totally start.

Tal Lavin@swordsjew.bsky.social · last yr.

i wrote about a beautiful memoir, cambodian history, the num pang sandwich, rice and bread: buttondown.com/theswordandt...