I was a bit frustrated that Iranian regime’s role in this war is being minimized and people’s historical struggle is ignored so I made a game for you to be the people and see where your decisions take you instead:

kuffmode.github.io/mirage/

This paper finds LLMs' ability to understand that others have different beliefs (Theory of Mind) comes from 0.001% of their parameters. Break those specific weights & the model loses both its ability to track what others know AND language comprehension

Interesting implications for models (& minds?)

I'm so excited to help bring this Computational Neuroscience workshop to life! Join a fantastic group of researchers in Denmark this August (11-14).
We've designed it for PhDs & postdocs to connect with experts and build new skills. Hope to see you there! Please do share with your colleagues!

Ready to shape the future of #ComputationalScience?
We’re inviting researchers like you to mentor student-led projects this July. Just 2-3 hours of commitment and no prep needed!

This is your chance to give back and grow!
➡️ Learn more and sign up to #volunteer neuromatch.io/mentoring/

Expectation violations as an effective alternative to complex mentalizing in novel communication Neuroscience; Systems neuroscience; Social sciences

✨Excited to share that our new paper is now out in iScience!✨

🧠 We show that people can coordinate surprisingly well in novel interactions by violating others' expectations - without requiring deep, recursive reasoning about others’ beliefs.

📄 Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Functional recruitment and connectivity of the cerebellum is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood Nature Communications - The cerebellum is heavily implicated in adult social cognition, but its role in Theory of Mind development remains unclear. Here, the authors show that children’s...

What about the social cerebellum during development we wondered? Here you find some cool insights on this awesome part of the brain! BIG thanks for the great work Katerina Manoli, and support from Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann and Frank van Overwalle 🧠🦋 rdcu.be/epKmZ

Ten simple rules for queer data collection and analysis by STEM researchers Queer people are still underrepresented both as STEM researchers and participants, partially due to a dearth of accurate data on this demographic. The lack of consideration for queer identities in dat...

Ten simple rules for queer data collection and analysis dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Funded PhD opportunity with @sjblakemore.bsky.social and I, at Cambridge. We are looking for someone interested in developmental science, to start in the coming academic year. Please share it with anyone you think might be interested (see details attached 😁).
drive.google.com/file/d/1RIvg...

Dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions differentially impact social influence and temporal discounting The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is involved in economic and social decision-making in humans but the specific functions of its subregions are not clear. This study shows that the dorsal mPFC is ca...

Dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions differentially impact social influence and temporal discounting journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... new lab paper from the fantastic @zhilinsu.bsky.social with wonderful collaborators 🌟

Deadline extended to 28th April!! Summer School in Computational Social Cognition with fantastic keynotes by Matthew Rushworth, @dianatamir.bsky.social and @davidamodio.bsky.social. Come & learn more about computational modelling, make new friends, & explore the UK's 2nd largest city 🙂👇. Please RT!

Comment: "Can a single brain cell be surprised?"

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Model-Based Neuroscience and Cognition Summer School Visit the post for more.

There is again a model-based neuroscience summer school from Aug 4-8th in Amsterdam! modelbasedneurosci.com

Deep reinforcement learning can promote sustainable human behaviour in a common-pool resource problem - Nature Communications Koster et al introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism designed to manage common-pool resources successfully encourages sustainable cooperation among human participants by dynamically adj...

getting this paper published was a bit painful but I am proud of it: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We use deep RL to find mechanisms that help (real) people sustain the commons. Well done to Raphael Koster and Miruna Pislar (not on BlueSky). non-paywalled version on arxiv.

Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex - Nature A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to re...

New paper “Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex” in @nature.com led by @mkwittmann.bsky.social with many others. We show basis functions code relations between people, similar to their role in other perceptual and motor domains www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper in Nature (@mkwittmann.bsky.social et al.): the brain does not only process the *identity* of a person but primarily our *relationship* to them. Even on a neural level, who someone is *in relation to others* is key. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #neuroskyence

We moved a conference halfway around the globe to avoid visa discrimination Event organizers often overlook the visa-related difficulties that researchers in low- and middle-income countries face. This must change.

Think about conference location to avoid visa discrimination www.nature.com/articles/d41...

ChatGPT for students: learners find creative new uses for chatbots The utility of generative AI tools is expanding far beyond simple summarisation and grammar support towards more sophisticated, pedagogical applications.

creative ways that students use chatGPT www.nature.com/articles/d41...

6️⃣Our results show that surprise is used to communicate in novel interaction, reflected in behavior, physiology, and neural activity. This suggests a cognitive mechanism shaping how we develop new communication systems and has implications for human communication, AI, and human-machine interaction.

5️⃣We thought that If Receivers recognize goals through surprise, we should see neural markers of expectation violations. Indeed, EEG data shows surprise is encoded in fronto-central brain regions, linking it to cognitive processes of detecting unexpected events.

4. To provide the physiological evidence of the model, we conducted model-based analysis of receive’s PDR data. Receivers’ PDR strongly correlates with model-derived surprise—suggesting that unexpected movements grab attention and influence cognitive processing.

3️⃣The Surprise Model accurately predicts Sender’s message design and participant behavior across different samples. It outperforms models using only movement or state priors, showing that all components are essential to capture human communication!

2️⃣TCG is a two-player game where the Sender moves on a grid-creating a message, while the Receiver must infer their hidden goal based on the observed message. After analyzing hundreds of messages, we identified three distinct message types senders used to communicate.

1️⃣To test this, we built a Surprise Model with two key components. The movement component assumes motion continues in a straight line, so deviations create surprise. The state prior encodes Sender’s goal information. We tested this model in the Tacit Communication Game (TCG).

Here we proposed that without a common language, people rely on universal physical principles to build shared understanding. Once a system is established, Senders strategically defy expectations to create meaning—making surprise a powerful communicative tool.

Expectation violations signal goals in novel human communication - Nature Communications In the absence of language, there is a lack of common knowledge necessary for efficient communication. Here, the authors show that people solve this problem by reverting to commonly accepted physical ...

✨Excited to share that our paper on how expectation violations shape novel human communication has just been published in Nature Communications! ✨

📖 read the full paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

🧵 Detailed breakdown bellow! 👇

Here we proposed that without a common language, people rely on universal physical principles to build shared understanding. Once a system is established, Senders strategically defy expectations to create meaning—making surprise a powerful communicative tool.

New preprint out with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social! When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge? We compare continual learning in humans and artificial neural networks, revealing similar patterns of transfer & catastrophic interference (1/8) osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 SUMMER SCHOOL!

Announcing the 2nd Birmingham-Leiden Summer School in Computational Social Cognition, Sep 2-5, 2025.

Fantastic line-up of keynote: Matthew Rushworth, Diana Tamir @dianatamir.bsky.social, and David Amodio @davidamodio.bsky.social .

👇
Apply by 18 April (compsoccog.com) and RT!

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.