End of an era! 🤠🌅

Last week I gave what will likely be my final PhD presentations at the regional meetings of the Society for Experimental Finance & the Economic Science Association.

The notorious "economist Q&A" rumors were greatly exaggerated—everyone was lovely! 🧵👇

Stressed and rushed? Your decisions might suffer New University of Melbourne research reveals how the combination of stress and time pressure can wreak havoc on our ability to make good choices

Excited to see our research on stress and decision-making featured in Pursuit today 😁

It's great to see these findings reaching a wider audience and I hope people find it interesting!

Read the full story here: pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/str...

#DecisionScience #Stress #Psychology #SciComm

Indiana Jones' tour of the Healthy Cognitive Ageing speaking circuit continued in Singapore last week at the Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference 🤠🇸🇬

I spoke about decision-making with healthy ageing under varying computational demands + snagged an award for Best Student Talk 🏆🧵👇

Chronic stress is a modern health epidemic that shortens lives, lowers quality of life, and costs billions. We thought it would break our ability to make good decisions.

We were wrong. 📉🧠

New preprint on stress and decision-making under varying computational demands. 🧵👇
🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Acute stress impairs decision-making at varying levels of decision complexity - Communications Psychology This study finds that acute stress alone has a surprisingly limited effect on decision-making, irrespective of the decision’s complexity. However, on decisions with experienced time pressure, acute st...

This study finds that acute stress has a limited effect on decision-making, irrespective of the decision’s complexity. However, on decisions with experienced time pressure, acute stress reduced decision quality.
@karlodoroc.bsky.social
@carstenmurawski.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Whom do we prefer to learn from in observational reinforcement learning? Author summary In our daily lives, we often learn by watching others. For example, when starting a new job, we might watch an experienced colleague to learn effective strategies, or an inexperienced c...

Our new paper “Whom do we prefer to learn from in observational reinforcement learning?” is now published in PLOS Computational Biology.

Led by @gotamorishita.bsky.social, w/ Nitin Yadav and Shinsuke Suzuki.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Acute stress impairs decision-making at varying levels of decision complexity - Communications Psychology This study finds that acute stress alone has a surprisingly limited effect on decision-making, irrespective of the decision’s complexity. However, on decisions with experienced time pressure, acute st...

🚨 New in Communications Psychology: we investigate the causal link between acute stress and higher-order decision-making.

Using a task with multiple levels of complexity, we find stress impairs decision quality—but not in the way you might think. 📜

📄 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Decision Making This book offers reports on new findings relating to mechanisms of decisions, modeling of decision making and impaired decision making upon diseases.

I am pleased to announce that our new book on "Decision Making: Fundamentals and Applications" is now published by @springernature.com ! A collection of 17 chapters over 325 pages on #DecisionMaking #Psychology #Philosophy #Psychiatry @carstenmurawski.bsky.social link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

🔈 Our edited volume "Decision Making: Fundamentals and Applications", co-edited with @ulrichettinger.bsky.social and Bert Heinrichs, is out.

url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/9P5mCROAEn...

#DecisionScience #DecisionMaking #Psychology #Psychiatry #Neuroscience #Philosophy

🧠💬 Do large language models really represent meaning like the human brain?

Our new fMRI study tested how transformers compare to brain representations of sentence meaning — and found that structure matters.

📄 Read more: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Decision Making This book offers reports on new findings relating to mechanisms of decisions, modeling of decision making and impaired decision making upon diseases.

"Decision Making: Fundamentals and Applications". Our new edited book due to appear in @springernature.com later this year! @carstenmurawski.bsky.social #DecisionScience #DecisionMaking #Psychology #Psychiatry #Neuroscience #Philosophy

link.springer.com/book/9783032...

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Seminar announcement: Franziska Knolle (Munich), 3 July 2025 Seminar announcement: Franziska Knolle (Munich), 3 July 2025

Our next speaker in the Bonn-Melbourne seminar series on decision-making and computational psychiatry is Franziska Knolle.

💡Topic: From Risk to Disorder: Decision-Making Dysfunctions in Psychosis

📅 Date: Thursday, 3 July 2025
🕖 Time: 9am CEST / 5pm AEDT

🔗 www.unimelb.edu.au/cbmm/about-u...

No Interest? The marginalization of women in academic finance Why do women experience such significant disadvantages within the financial system and across a broad suite of financial outcomes - from the leadership of major institutions to disposable income? And ...

Why do women experience such significant disadvantages within the financial system, and what can we do about it?

And why isn't academic finance interested in these questions? New research with @carstenmurawski.bsky.social and Nitin Yadav.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/intere...

Is it true you use only 10 bits / s of your brain?
@andpru.bsky.social and I provide a motor systems perspective on a proposed speed limit for human information processing. Out today in
@natneuro.nature.com:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Seminar announcement: Nura Sidarus (London), 22 May 2025 Seminar announcement: Nura Sidarus (London), 22 May 2025

Our next speaker in the Bonn-Melbourne seminar series on decision-making and computational psychiatry is Nura Sidarus.

💡Topic: Investigating negative self-attribution and self-evaluation biases in depression

📅 Date: Thursday, 22 May 2025
🕖 Time: 9am CEST / 5pm AEDT

🔗 go.unimelb.edu.au/mo8p

Science Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.

Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow:
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...

TODAY!

Our next speaker in the Bonn-Melbourne seminar series on decision-making and computational psychiatry is Constantin Rothkopf.

💡Topic: Eye Movements As Sequential Decision-making Under Uncertainty

📅 Date: Thursday, 10 April 2025
🕖 Time: 9am CEST / 5pm AEDT

🔗 go.unimelb.edu.au/h2jp

Tonight!

@ulrichettinger.bsky.social @unibonn.bsky.social @unimelb-cbmm.bsky.social #unimelb

Seminar announcement: Andrea Reiter (Germany), 27 March 2025 Seminar announcement: Andrea Reiter (Germany), 27 March 2025

Our next speaker in the Bonn-Melbourne seminar series on decision-making and computational psychiatry is Professor Andrea Reiter.

💡Topic: Social Decision-Making from Adolescence to Adulthood

📅 Date: 27 March 2025
🕖 Time: 9am CEST / 7pm AEDT

🔗 More information: www.unimelb.edu.au/cbmm/about-u...

Book cover of Patriarchy Inc.: What we get wrong about gender equality and why men still win at work by Cordelia Fine

My latest book, Patriarchy Inc., is out now in the UK, published by @atlanticbooks.bsky.social and distributed by @allenandunwin.bsky.social in Australia.

More information at www.cordelia-fine.com/patriarchy-i...

The Relationship Between Schizotypal Personality Traits and Temporal Discounting: The Role of the Date/Delay Effect AbstractBackground and Hypothesis. Many patients with psychiatric disorders show increased temporal discounting (TD), ie, they discount future rewards more

Out now: our new paper entitled "The Relationship Between Schizotypal Personality Traits and Temporal Discounting: The Role of the Date/Delay Effect" in a Schizophrenia Bulletin special issue on Neuroscience of Schizotypy! academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

Quite the indictment of AI products: they are more appealing to people who don't understand how they work and see them as magical

The paper concludes: "businesses may benefit from targeting those with lower AI literacy" and "maintaining an aura of magic around AI" ✨

tinyurl.com/ynefd8zk

Bonn Melbourne Seminar in Decision Making and Computational Psychiatry

There are some exciting talks coming up in the Bonn Melbourne Seminar in Decision Making and Computational Psychiatry! Please DM if you would like to join. #DecisionMaking #ComputationalPsychiatry @carstenmurawski.bsky.social

www.psychologie.uni-bonn.de/de/institut/...

Human Thought Is Far Slower Than Your Internet Connection (Gift Article) A new study is “a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” one researcher said.

I wrote about a scientific paper called “The Unbearable Slowness of Being” which finds that the human brain’s throughput is just 10 bits per second. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/s...
🧪

Those bold AGI predictions are suddenly looking stretched Recent signs suggest that the main approach to improving AI models has begun to slow down.

We totally did not see this coming 🙄

www.businessinsider.com/agi-predicti...

"It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding coures. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right questions or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result."

I am pleased to announce the next talk in the Bonn Melbourne Seminar in Decision Making and Computational Psychiatry! Please DM if you would like to join. #DecisionMaking #ComputationalPsychiatry @carstenmurawski.bsky.social @unibonn.bsky.social

Bonn Melbourne Seminar in Decision Making and Computational Psychiatry

Join us online for the Bonn Melbourne Seminar in Decision Making and Computational Psychiatry! DM for login details. #DecisionMaking #ComputationalPsychiatry #PsychSciSky #NeuroSkyence #CompNeuroSky www.psychologie.uni-bonn.de/de/institut/...