Provocative title ftw. (Tho it inspired @kristorpjensen.bsky.social to give a talk titled "planning in the brain: it's not what nathaniel thinks it is")

Annual Reviews@annualreviews.bsky.social · 3w ago

The 2026 volume of the Annual Review of Neuroscience is now online 🧠 The most read article is "Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is" by @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social

1/ 🚨 New preprint: "Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist" Introducing AutoCog 🤖 — a fully autonomous AI system that runs the entire scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science to surface novel theories of human behavior 🧵

Co-let w/ @younesstrittmatter.bsky.social Kudos to the all-start team of @georgekafetzis.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social, @ericschulz.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, @suyoghc.bsky.social, and @cocoscilab.bsky.social

Akshay K. Jagadish@akjagadish.bsky.social · last mo.

1/ 🚨 New preprint: "Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist" Introducing AutoCog 🤖 — a fully autonomous AI system that runs the entire scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science to surface novel theories of human behavior 🧵

I've been a bit quiet lately (lots of teaching duties...), but I am glad to share that I will have some academic "me time" for the next few weeks. I will be at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute & Department of Psychology, for a research stay hosted by @nathanieldaw.bsky.social!

First paper since joining Google DeepMind! We present 🌍ATLAS (Active Theory Learning for Automated Science), a pipeline that generates interpretable mechanistic models from data and optimizes experiments to test them. Thread below

I have been so excited about this project. In many ways the most surprising thing to me was how seemingly similar the AI-discovered models were to simple ones I thought I understood, even though they fit way better. This means we can also really get what makes them work.

Kevin J Miller@kevinjmiller.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do we predict what’s going to happen next? In a new paper, we @arikahn.bsky.social @licezhang.bsky.social @nathanieldaw.bsky.social @catehartley.bsky.social ask how kids, teens, and adults solve this problem. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Developmental Change in Structure Learning Reflects a Shift From Recency‐Based to Relational Prediction

Children are adept statistical learners, capable of parsing streams of structured input into meaningful units, but the cognitive processes they engage during learning may differ from those of adults...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New paper out in cognition with @arikahn.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, Cate Hartley, and @katenuss.bsky.social !! We show that children 👶 use predictive representations (e.g. SR) to guide their choices, providing an account of how they can make flexible choices in a changing world

Children leverage predictive representations for flexible, value-guided choice

By harnessing a mental model of how the world works, learners can make flexible choices in changing environments. However, while children and adolesce…

sciencedirect.com

This is the best news for Princeton since John Nash's thesis. admission.princeton.edu/apply/standa...

New paper in CPsy 📢 - from Mostafa Abdou, @raziasahi.bsky.social, Thomas Hull, @eriknook.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social - cpsyjournal.org/articles/10....

Leveraging large language models to estimate clinically relevant psychological constructs in psychotherapy transcripts | Computational Psychiatry

cpsyjournal.org

Logic of Emotion Lab@logicemotionlab.bsky.social · 11mo ago

We have a new paper published in @cpsyjournal.bsky.social! We used large-language models (LLMs) to estimate linguistic distance in psychotherapy text and found that these ratings tracked with clients’ symptoms in treatment over time, more strongly than word-counting techniques did.

Come work with us! @princetonneuro.bsky.social and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience, to be hired jointly in Psychology and Neuroscience: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

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

Reconciling flexibility and efficiency: medial entorhinal cortex represents a compositional cognitive map

Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

rdcu.be

We @smfleming.bsky.social, Marion Rouault and @seowxft.bsky.social and I) have posted a reply osf.io/preprints/ps... to a preprint that recently raised concerns about the validity of associations between mental health and metacognition from online studies. I hope you can take the time to read it.

heads up on a cool postdoc at cambridge. i collaborate on this project as well and looking forward to interacting with the team.

Deborah Talmi@dtalmi.bsky.social · last yr.

We have an open postdoc position with Rik Henson @rhens.bsky.social and Emily Holmes, at the Emotional Cognition Lab dtalmi.wixsite.com/emotional-co..., @uniofcam.bsky.social to conduct advanced memory modelling. Details here: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50770/ Apply by 21.4!

New preprint 📝 - another fun collaboration with @arikahn.bsky.social, @licezhang.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social We ask: Why do children and adults often derive different representations of their environments from the same experiences? 🧠👶🔎 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to share a new paper with Daphna Shohamy & @nathanieldaw.bsky.social! Using fmri reactivation, we measured *when* people build preferences from memory. We found that people tend to do so before a choice, but that they also wait until choice time when options are linked to multiple memories

Proactive and reactive construction of memory-based preferences - Nature Communications

Making new decisions requires retrieving memories, but when this occurs is unclear. The authors show that people typically access memories before a choice unless there are many related memories to con...

nature.com

one of the most intriguing projects i've been involved in: automated scientific discovery in an area (human/animal RL) I've been working on forever. can an LLM do the job of my grad students? if it is backed up by super smart scientists incl @pcastr.bsky.social @neurokim.bsky.social & kevin miller

Pablo Samuel Castro@pcastr.bsky.social · last yr.

Can LLMs be used to discover interpretable models of human and animal behavior?🤔 Turns out: yes! Thrilled to share our latest preprint where we used FunSearch to automatically discover symbolic cognitive models of behavior. 1/12

announcing this year's neuroeconomics summer school, this time outside paris. too many great lecturers to list, even too many great organizers (plassmann,glimcher,tymula,kable,me). & you wouldnt believe all the past students and where they are now. sign up: www.insead.edu/events/neuro...

Neuroeconomics Summer School

insead.edu

hello world. we have an opening for a strong theory postdoc to work in my lab on a exciting collaboration with Josh Berke and Loren Frank labs modeling and analyzing data on rat hipp-pfc-bg-da involvement in spatial maze foraging, replay, value etc. apply here: www.princeton.edu/acad-positio...

Hey 🦋 fam! Check out this great summary of our study by @psypost.bsky.social, out now in Psychological Medicine doi.org/10.1017/S003... w Deanna Barch, Johanne Solis, Temitope Oshinowo, Ivan Grahek, Anna Konova, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social & Jon Cohen. Thanks to funders @njacts.bsky.social & NJHF!

PsyPost@psypost.bsky.social · 2y ago

Depression symptoms are associated with effort-based decisions: anxiety with greater cognitive effort, anhedonia and apathy with physical effort avoidance, and greater depression severity with lower task-leaving thresholds. #Depression #MentalHealth #Psychology #CognitiveEffort #Anxiety

New preprint - "Children leverage predictive representations for flexible, value-guided choice." A fun collaboration with @arikahn.bsky.social @nathanieldaw.bsky.social @catehartley.bsky.social, led by @licezhang.bsky.social 🧠🧒💻

Alice Zhang@licezhang.bsky.social · 2y ago

psyarxiv.com/y3dzn preprint from the time i spent at @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social 💜 - we were puzzled by past findings suggesting that children learn about the structure of the world, but don't use this knowledge to flexibly guide their decision-making as much as adults do.

In a dynamic reinforcement learning task, human players adaptively employ a mix of decision strategies, including model-based learning but also the successor representation. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Humans rationally balance detailed and temporally abstract world models - Communications Psychology

In a dynamic reinforcement learning task, human players adaptively employ a mix of decision strategies, including model-based learning but also the successor representation.

nature.com

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉 tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...

How do DA and 5HT drugs alter reinforcement learning? Join us next Wednesday for talks by @anahitm.bsky.social, Diego Pizzagalli, Michael Browning, Roshan Cools, Emma Robinson, Yael Niv, Cath Harmer, Isabel Berwian, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social and Anne Collins. Links etc: acplab.org/2024/11/15/r...

New in Nature Communication with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social : humans tell apart volatility from stochasticity & adapt their learning adaptively in opposite directions. Both response times and prediction data suggest outcome autocorrelation is key in this process www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computational processes of simultaneous learning of stochasticity and volatility in humans - Nature Communications

Adaptive learning is difficult in noisy environments, yet people often succeed. Here, the authors show that humans do this by distinguishing between two easily confused types of noise—volatility and s...

nature.com

Human behavior is hierarchically structured. But what determines *which* hierarchies people use? In a preprint, we run an experiment where people create programs that correspond to hierarchies, finding that people prefer structures with more reuse. arxiv.org/abs/2311.18644 1/7

One more week to apply for our joint faculty position in Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Computer Science Dept, in neuroAI and intelligent systems, broadly construed. Do you fit? Yes. But feel free to contact me with q's. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Come work with us! @PrincetonNeuro and @PrincetonCS are searching for a joint faculty member in NeuroAI and intelligent systems. On the PNI side, our human cog neuro group (already v. computational) is esp keen to develop more connections with AI and CS. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

@mgallen.bsky.social Interception is narcissism. Change my mind on Twitter.

My favorite part of the consciousness pseudoscience letter discourse is the repeated sense that free energy theory is implicitly criticized or perhaps next up against the wall.