Recently heard some ppl complain that "cognitive/neuroscience doesn't have, and needs, a universal law like physics!" Isn't the "universal" framework basically reinforcement learning? RL is the analog of the Langragian framework in physics.

I always wondered what the point of going to conferences was. Finally figured it out this year at @cogscisociety.bsky.social and CCN: to maximize the number of interesting, fulfilling scientific conversations! Had such a blast in Rio and NYC, will cherish all the convos I had :)

I've been reading James Baldwin's work and can't help but make the analogy that he's "the Einstein of art". His framework for the human experience explains so much variance across human societies. Is so concise. So natural and simple, that it feels like a "General Relativity of art".

osf.io/preprints/ps... My PI Peter Dayan and I just released our preprint proposing a new framework "recursive-MDP" integrating meta-control and meta-cognition! Couched in RL, recursive-MDP presents a new ontology for meta-control - monitoring and adjusting ongoing cognitive processes.

Explaining the scientific process to a non-scientist friend: it's like building sand castles/sculptures. First you plop a pile of a sand down, roughly resembling some shape. This is the brainstorming and discussions, early stages of a project.

Many thanks to @klaus-tschira-stiftung.de and @gso-forresearchers.bsky.social for this wonderful opportunity to study the mechanisms underlying naturalistic decision processes in the context of foraging behavior! We’ll also soon have openings for PhD students, stay tuned!

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics@mpicybernetics.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🎉 @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social has been awarded the @klaus-tschira-stiftung.de Boost Fund! Moving beyond short-term trials to naturalistic scenarios: Roxana will explore how we decide in changing environments. 🔗 www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/zeraati-tsch... #DecisionMaking #ComputationalNeuroscience

How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs? Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After my lab visit in Lausanne, I spent some time in Aosta Valley and Evolène. The scenery was absolutely breathtaking.

Possibly the line of work I'm most excited about is my collaboration with @davidnagy.bsky.social, Hanqi Zhou + PIs on the connection between analogies and model-reuse in reinforcement learning. In our recent perspective paper, we chart our future research agenda. arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16511

Understanding "complexity" has been a goal of mine. In @surabhisnath.bsky.social and my paper, we build a novel model of complexity judgments for images using the Segment Anything Model, finding surprisingly high correlation between the number of segments and complexity. arxiv.org/abs/2403.03134

Simplicity in Complexity : Explaining Visual Complexity using Deep Segmentation Models

The complexity of visual stimuli plays an important role in many cognitive phenomena, including attention, engagement, memorability, time perception and aesthetic evaluation. Despite its importance, c...

arxiv.org

Awesome visit at @gerstnerlab.bsky.social in EPFL, Lausanne. What a stunning campus too!

Last year my PI Peter Dayan and I published our paper on risk-sensitive exploration in eLife! TD;LR AI agents can be purely neophilic since they can "reset". Ample evidence of how biological agents trade off neophobia vs neophilia. We built a computational model! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

On emergence, complexity and scientific subjectivity and pessimism. Been trying to understand “emergence” and “complexity” in the last few years. Have a roughly coherent understanding, and what they imply about “scientific pessimism”.