🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏
🚨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?
Curiosity-filled conversations sparked this project and teamwork has carried it forward 🫂
It's been a huge pleasure to be a part of it with @birtandemirel.bsky.social, Sage Boettcher @dynacog-lab.bsky.social, @kateewatkins.bsky.social and Kia Nobre @brognition.bsky.social 🍀
Find out more 🦑🗣️⌛️⬇️
@summerfieldlab.bsky.social and I are very happy to share this paper! Building on work by @scychan.bsky.social, we show that how people learn depends on the distribution of examples they see, and changes in a way that’s very similar to transformer models.
Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...
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🎉 My PhD work has just been published in @natcomms.nature.com!
How do we learn who caused what - and how much control we had - when outcomes depend on multiple people? We studied how humans do so using a new social learning task, computational modelling and fMRI.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵👇
Our new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread:
Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.
After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.
If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.
eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...
What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard
A revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction.
What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? by Hanna Pickard, illustrated by Marco Venniro, is now available (3 March UK pub).
Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
A meta-analysis of studies using Tolman’s sunburst maze suggests poor replicability and little evidence for shortcutting. Ouch! Definitely relevant reading for anyone interested in cognitive maps! 👇
Abstract When we empathize with someone going through something, we often draw on our past experiences with the someone and the something. These kinds of experiences ground "thick empathy", a form of empathy that has been largely overlooked in the psychology and neuroscience literature. Consider how a mother, empathizing with her daughter about to give birth, can draw on her own experience of childbirth, and her relationship with her daughter, to deeply grasp what her daughter is going through in a way that others who lack those experiences cannot. I argue that thick empathy deserves more empirical attention because it is associated with well-being and helps us build networks of effective mutual social support. My analysis highlights novel risks and dilemmas posed by "empathy machines" that promise to enhance or even replace human empathy and are becoming increasingly popular as a potential solution to widespread loneliness. Even when empathy machines provide value to individuals, their widespread adoption risks imposing collective emotional and epistemic costs that ultimately make it harder for us to empathize well. Keywords: empathy, understanding, experience, thick description, ethnography, phenomenal knowledge, interpersonal knowledge, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, chatbots
New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/
Our new paper, now published in @natcomms.nature.com , asks a simple question: when two tasks share a common structure, does the brain learn them more efficiently? Surprisingly, this was not the case. Thread below (1/7)
rdcu.be/eSwvU
There are 3 Oxford-based post doc positions for this Wellcome Trust project that will be advertised soon!
If you have experinece in neurostimulation (tms/tus) and/or modelling of cogneuro data in humans do contact one of us (me, @mkflugge.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social, Jacinta OShea) to discuss!
My paper is out!
Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets.
rdcu.be/eQjLN
Excited to share a new preprint, accepted as a spotlight at #NeurIPS2025!
Humans are imperfect decision-makers, and autonomous systems should understand how we deviate from idealized rationality
Our paper aims to address this! 👀🧠✨
arxiv.org/abs/2510.25951
a 🧵⤵️
😂🙏
When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com
Work with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @tsonj.bsky.social, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
These computational considerations have implications for understanding the algorithms supporting goal pursuit—and how miscalibration of these mechanisms might relate to mental health
We explore three adaptive reasons for "stubborn goals": (1) efficient use of cognitive resources, (2) shielding decisions from interference/temptation, and (3) scaffolding motivation when rewards are abstract or distant
Super happy to see this review out! We ask why people are so reluctant to abandon goals and how this commitment could be understood computationally. Work with Jill O'Reilly & @yaelniv.bsky.social
🚨Out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨
We explore the use of cognitive theories/models with real-world data for understanding mental health.
We review emerging studies and discuss challenges and opportunities of this approach.
With @yaelniv.bsky.social and @eriknook.bsky.social
Thread ⬇️
Check out @gaiamolinaro.bsky.social 's new paper!
Check out @tifenpan.bsky.social 's just published paper! we demonstrate how to use RNNs to infer latent variables from cognitive models, even when standard methods don't work easily.
My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle!
We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate.
It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations.
Spread the words!
New preprint by William D'Alessandro and myself:
The promise and peril of AI surrogacy in psychological research
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Cartoon image of me looking at a map, with a stadium behind me and a hotel and ferris wheel across the river in the background. I am thinking about going to the ferris wheel
My first PhD paper - with @lhuntneuro.bsky.social and @summerfieldlab.bsky.social - is now out in @plosbiology.org! We ask: how do humans (and deep neural networks) navigate flexibly even in unfamiliar environments, such as a new city? Link: plos.io/45uSwNm 🧵 (1/6)
I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026!
I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory!
RT appreciated!
(1/5)
Does Sleeping on a idea work? Nice to see our work led by the amazing @anikaloewe.bsky.social and @maritpetzka.bsky.social featured together with other studies in the WaPo:
www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/202...
Our preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
We are excited to post a new preprint with Shiyi Liang @shiyiliang.bsky.social:
'Reinforcement learning is positively associated with anhedonia symptoms' osf.io/preprints/ps...
(a bit late here – a version was online back in December)
@mpc-comppsych.bsky.social
New preprint 📝 - another fun collaboration with @arikahn.bsky.social, @licezhang.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social
We ask: Why do children and adults often derive different representations of their environments from the same experiences? 🧠👶🔎
osf.io/preprints/ps...
