New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.
There seems to be a broad perception across psychology and neuroscience that work shouldn't be "too technical" in order to reach the broadest possible audience. While I think we should strive for accessibility, I feel that this attitude can also be self-defeating: why are we dumbing down?
New preprint, on a very different topic: a mathematical theory of evolution for self-designing AI.
AI is increasingly designed by AI. What systems might emerge after generations of self-designing AIs competing for computing resources? ↓
arxiv.org/abs/2604.05142
So excited to see this finally out!! 🤩🎉 A big thank you to our reviewers for their helpful feedback and to @modirshanechi.bsky.social and Wulfram Gerstner for the wonderful collaboration!
Call for a PhD position in Cognitively inspired natural language processing with Lisa Beinborn and me. Part of the new SPP "Robust Assessment & Safe Applicability of Language Modelling: Foundations for a New Field of Language Science & Technology” (LaSTing). huds.uni-goettingen.de/assets/Call_...
Novelty is not just about whats new, but also what feels new given past experience. New study from Sophia Becker in Wulfram Gerstner’s @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social lab posits a model showing how similarity between familiar and novel stimuli shapes exploration and learning - doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
Congratulations, Roxana! 🎉🥳
Excited that my paper on metacontrol in humans and neural networks with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social and @lhuntneuro.bsky.social is out in PNAS! We examine the way that predictive representations of control enable behavioral adaptation across settings, and pathologies: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123
cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature
out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)
he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals
doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202
New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6....
As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18
Thank you! 😊
Attending #Cosyne2026?
Come by our poster in the afternoon (#021) to talk about the sense of control, empowerment, and agency. 🧠🤖
We propose a unifying formulation of the sense of control and empirically characterize the human subjective sense of control.
Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧑🔬🧪🔬
How are neural manifolds and single-neuron response properties related to circuit structure?
How degenerate are these relationships?
Theory and a plethora of examples can be found in the following paper, out today in Neuron 🌟
It was a privilege to co-supervise first author @lpezon.bsky.social!
Excited to share our new paper to be published in Neuron!
With Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social and Wulfram Gerstner @gerstnerlab.bsky.social, we explore how circuit structure in RNNs shapes network computation and single-neuron responses.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
New @sfb1528.bsky.social and @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social publication. We show that mothers are worthy of the pedagogical assumption: they preferentially sample information that fills their child's knowledge gaps and children learn best from maternal sampling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).
Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🚨New pre-print🚨
osf.io/preprints/ps...
What if the relationship between smartphone use and mental health depends not just on specific harmful or beneficial activities, but also on how users transition between activities?
One week left to apply!
Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)
This gene editing approach specifically targets a single nucleotide corrected behavioural abnormalities in an animal model of Snijders Blok–Campeau syndrome
go.nature.com/40j3rX3
🚨 Hiring in Munich 🇩🇪: 2 open-topic PhD positions in human & machine learning (TVöD E13 80%).
Start ~June 2026 (flexible). Deadline: March 2, 2026.
Apply/info: hcai-munich.com/PhD_Job_Ad.pdf
Reposts appreciated 🙏
I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.
I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
Come and join us in beautiful Munich! 🧠
We have a friendly, collaborative, and inclusive environment, where scientific rigour and curiosity are celebrated. 🎉
#psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #neurosky #neuroskyence #ScienceCareer #AcademicJobs #Researcher #ResearchOpportunities #JobSearch
Come and join us in beautiful Munich! 🧠
We have a friendly, collaborative, and inclusive environment, where scientific rigour and curiosity are celebrated. 🎉
#psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #neurosky #neuroskyence #ScienceCareer #AcademicJobs #Researcher #ResearchOpportunities #JobSearch
Iranians are experiencing a collective trauma. Thousands have been killed/injured in recent events, the economy is crippled & the threat of a wider conflict is real. This is especially difficult for those living in Iran, as many have lost (or fear losing) loved ones. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Our model jointly learns object embeddings and idiosyncratic weightings of psychological dimensions.
The results show improved accuracy on hold-out data as well as reliably measurable dimensional weights (up to ~8 dimensions) and summary stats thereof
Do people's internal representations of natural objects differ? We (@ericschulz.bsky.social) show so by incorporating idiosyncrasies into neural nets to create better models of human behavior. We also reliably extract idiosyncrasies and map them to demographics. More: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pxt9a
These days I drink Iranian tea everyday so I don't forget.
Media coverage of these events have been very poor in my internet bubble so far.
