Congratulations to Sherry Dongqi Bao who has successfully defended her PhD Thesis: "Rational adaptation to noise and uncertainty: from representation to metacognitive control."
We wish her all the best! 😀
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...
Huge thanks to my supervisor @todd-hare.bsky.social and my mentor Micah Edelson for their extensive guidance on this project, and to the reviewers for their encouraging and helpful comments!
Based on a normative model, this responsibility-induced loss of confidence explains why we may try to pass the choice to someone else instead of taking on the burden of responsibility.
This confidence gap did not vanish when participants had unlimited time to gather evidence and decide, and it also persisted even when participants were given feedback showing that their accuracy was the same across conditions.
What we found: Participants were equally accurate when deciding for themselves or the group. However, they reported reliably lower confidence when their choice affected the whole group. Computational modeling tracked down changes in metacognitive bias in the process.
What we did: We asked ~400 volunteers to simply choose which of two circles contained more dots. The outcomes of the decisions either affected only the decision-maker, or the payoff for a four-person group the decision-maker belonged to.
These findings reveal new insights into how social responsibility changes our metacognition—specifically, how we trust our own judgments when we are accountable for others. This could be helpful in enhancing how we design decision environments, from policy-making to human-AI collaboration.
Most studies on the effects of social responsibility focus on risky gambles. We were motivated to find out if taking responsibility for others alters one of our fundamental cognitive processes—metacognition—even when no risk is involved.
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
How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all times, Yes, I teach it to students daily, and refer to it in lots of papers. Sorry. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...
📢 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.
Many neuroscience students are steeped in an experiment-first style of thinking that leads to “random walk science.” Let’s not forget how theory can guide experiments towards deeper insights, writes @gershbrain.bsky.social.
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social
and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8
Alex Pouget and I wrote a perspective a few years ago on Major Sources of Computational Complexity in Complex Decision-Making 🧠. We never got around to publishing it, and so now uploaded it to OSF Preprints: doi.org/10.31219/osf.... I hope some of you might find it useful.
