Top of my reading list 💫

this is beyond the argument that risk aversion in prospect theory models is more descriptive than mechanistic, another issue needing work.

Anxiety involves altered planning Clinicians have suggested but not shown how anxiety involves altered planning. Here, I synthesize and extend computational models of planning in a framework that can be used to explain planning biases...

I don't think risk aversion in trait anxiety is conceptualized well in most comp models. My bet is risk aversion is in part domain-specific. We need to first infer world models - hierarchical prior knowledge schema - to really measure risk aversion we care about. See:
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

LLM agents are a serious problem for online experiments.
It is very easy to use them and very hard to spot them. What can researchers do?

With @brendenlake.bsky.social, we suggest detecting LLMs based on their lack of human cognitive constraints in our #CogSci2026 paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.00016

Amid the insanity here, I'm so proud of our lab's milestones🚨

(1) Hadas (BA) led the 1st lab's publication on task generalization in anxiety

(2) Adi (MA) won a spotlight talk @ this year's computational psychiatry conference !

🥂I'm lucky to have such great students

📘 Excited to share that Decision Making: A Very Short Introduction (OUP) is now available online (PDF for subscribers):
doi.org/10.1093/9780...

What is it about?

Understanding how humans (and other agents) make choices.
Below a bit more information👇

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning..

We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance.

And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use!

1/

Our new paper asks whether autism is linked to the way people learn from rewards. We’ve previously shown that people not only learn to value the features that predict reward, but also assign credit to features of their actions that they know are irrelevant (in this case, the card's location).

I tend to prefer short and to-the-point article titles, but this one is a clear exception

Plural Causes Abstract. Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a li...

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because

(a) There was cilantro in the soup

*and*

(b) Amy is allergic to cilantro

Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

🧵 I gave Claude two things: a short paper (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) and a raw behavioural dataset with 3 lines of variable descriptions.

Then I asked it to fit three computational RL models described only by equations in the manuscript. No code, no toolbox, no guidance on the fitting procedure. 1/3

Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social!

Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal!

A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

New preprint!🚨

How do people learn how to search the visual world?

Across 3 experiments, @chrisahn.bsky.social and I show that abstract environmental statistics shape visual strategy selection, but asymmetrically. People readily lean into bottom-up salience, but only override it when they have to.

New semester, new schedule.

State-dependent spatial maps for navigation Internal behavioral states influence many brain circuits, with well-known effects in sensory areas. Less is known about how these states shape downstream navigation circuits, such as the medial entorhinal cortex and hippocampus, which construct spatial maps from grid and place cells. Emerging evidence suggests that these maps can spontaneously switch (‘remap’) in stable environments and that remapping is linked to behavioral changes that are state related. We consider the circuit mechanisms underlying this spontaneous remapping and its role in facilitating state-dependent goal-directed behavior. We suggest that behavioral state shifts may trigger remapping similarly to external environmental changes, enabling spatial maps to adapt to current goals. This dynamic mapping could help encode distinct memories across different experiences, aligning neural representations with behavioral states.

Online Now: State-dependent spatial maps for navigation

💥New paper out! Why do some people generalise threat more than others? We show that anxious people generalise more strongly, even after accounting for perceptual mistakes.

A huge (!) thanks to @ondrejzika.bsky.social @nicoschuck.bsky.social and @bernhardspitzer.bsky.social

And I struggle to imagine what it would look like in the US if similar threats were faced (it would surely be worse).

Our little cousin is 3 years old and watches a video cartoon designed to normalize rocket fire so it feels less scary.

Everyone here is praying this ends soon. But in the meantime, there's no loss of people's willingness to aid one another. I never felt this sense of community in the US...

We have a little strong community, similar to so many strong communities of people helping each other physically and psychologically. What a surreal and amazing thing to be part of. The morale somehow continues to be ok despite cars on fire, cluster missiles randomly hitting homes...

What an amazing + resilient culture here in Israel with all of these missiles directed at us (yes civilians). Our shelter has an Arab-Israeli family of five, w the cutest kids, a young Jewish-Israeli couple w a newborn, + us, w our new puppy. We're sharing food, stories, laughs amid the horror... 🧵

Proud to share the lab’s first preprint, led by the fantastic @christinamaher.bsky.social! 🎉

Real-world environments are high-dimensional and noisy.
Selective attention is thought to shape the state representations that make reinforcement learning tractable.

A new task to measure cumulative motivation: have participants critically evaluate an article. Then, randomly (and frequently enough), send unnerving warnings to their phone that a missile is heading for them and they should find the nearest bomb shelter.

The task is called "welcome to my life."

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...

New preprint! Where we used multiplayer games to track brain activity underlying the sustained intergroup bias. Led by @oritn.bsky.social . "Group-dependent learning and decision neural signals underlie the persistence of intergroup bias" doi.org/10.31234/osf... 👇

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking:

Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods?

(alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

Claude code indeed helps working in-between alarms that missiles are in the sky.

so so horrible. stay safe.