What makes adaptive decision-making possible?
New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Thanks for sharing our work!

For anyone interested, here's a short thread summarizing the main takeaways:

bsky.app/profile/nikl...

This is figure 4, which shows adaptive mentalization —dynamic update of opponent-level beliefs —can be decoded with high out-of-sample accuracy from neural activity.

Successful social interaction relies on predicting others’ behavior. A study in Nature Neuroscience shows how humans adjust to changing strategies, revealing a neural signature of adaptive belief updating. go.nature.com/3P7U0aG #Neuroskyence 🧪

Thanks for sharing our work!

For anyone interested, here's a short thread summarizing the main takeaways:

bsky.app/profile/nikl...

Some nice coverage here of our study published in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social CNNI on structure learning and uncertainty in compulsivity

📃 Paper available here - www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245...

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)

Thanks for sharing our work!

For anyone interested, here's a short thread summarizing the main takeaways:

bsky.app/profile/nikl...

What can rock-paper-scissors tell us about what I think that you think that I'm thinking? Check out this cool work to find out!

🤛🤛📄

A new study reveals what brain networks govern social mentalization and adaptation, making it possible to predict how flexibly one person reacts to others.
Published in @natneuro.nature.com

👉 www.econ.uzh.ch/en/news/rese...

📣 New publication 📣

Very excited to share our new paper "A neural signature of adaptive mentalization" out now in Nature Neuroscience (the project started all the way back in 2018!); with
@niklasbuergi.bsky.social
@drgokhanaydogan.bsky.social
@christianruff.bsky.social

(1/4)

Neurocomputational mechanisms of adaptive mentalization in humans ‘Theory of mind’ (ToM) is classically investigated with ‘static’ inference tasks, which miss the dynamic nature of social interactions. In a recent article, Buergi, Aydogan, and colleagues combined co...

For another perspective, see this TICS Spotlight by Toan Nong, Jun Feng, and Jean-Claude Dreher - many thanks for discussing our work!

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

This work was done with @drgokhanaydogan.bsky.social, @arkadykonovalov.bsky.social, and @ccruff.bsky.social at @zne-uzh.bsky.social @econ.uzh.ch .

Many thanks to our reviewers which helped significantly strengthen the manuscript!

Remarkably, predictive accuracy remained high even for participants from an independent, demographically more diverse dataset.

This suggests that the pattern reflects a robust and generalizable neural signature of adaptive mentalization.

But neither of these regions is specific to adaptive mentalization.

What if we revert the question and ask if we can predict it from neural activity?

Using machine learning, we identified a distributed neural signature that predicted adaptive mentalization with high accuracy.

Crucially, our model quantifies participants’ trial-level insight about the other’s strategy, prompting a revision of their own mentalization strategy.

This adaptive belief update was encoded in key hubs of the social brain network, in particular the right TPJ and the anterior insula.

We found that almost everyone adapted their belief inference to their opponents, using both human and artificial opponents.

Our novel Cognitive Hierarchy Assessment (CHASE) model captures the underlying cognitive processes and outperformed existing models in predicting behavior.

Here, we provide a neurocomputational account of such adaptive mentalization, by building on the recursive reasoning / level-k framework (I think that you think that…).

Participants played repeated ✊✋✌️-games, where the only way to win above chance is predicting the other’s next move.

Several studies have begun to illuminate how the brain implements belief inference strategies.

But people reason differently - so successful mentalization requires adapting to the strategy of the interaction partner!

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...

Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion Making decisions on behalf of other people reduces decision confidence, which leads to responsibility aversion.

Happy to share my first first-author paper, new in Science Advances: Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceAdvancesResearch @zne-uzh.bsky.social @econ.uzh.ch

Hans Berger and an EEG recording

🧠 What if you could see thoughts?

When Hans Berger recorded the first human EEG, many scientists didn’t believe him. Today, EEG is one of neuroscience’s most important tools.

The story behind it is fascinating: 👇
www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/berger

📣 New book chapter

Excited to see my chapter "The Neural Mechanisms of Strategic Decision-Making" finally out in a new book, "Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions", edited by @dvsmith.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, and Dominic Fareri.

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Probability weighting arises from boundary repulsions of cognitive noise In both risky choice and perception, people overweight small and underweight large probabilities. While prospect theory models this with a probability weighting function, and Bayesian noisy coding mod...

📢 Preprint out! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... What gives rise to probability weighting, a cornerstone of Prospect Theory?
We show it comes from the natural boundedness of probabilities + cognitive noise. Adding boundaries adds multiple distortions, across risky choice & perception.

🤔How do humans anticipate an opponent's moves in strategic games?

Excited to share our latest work on #mentalization in strategic games.
After years of work, we've empirically validated our new model, behaviorally (N~500) and neurally (N~100) 🧠 a 🧵 (1/5)