Parnian Rafei

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

Banner image with screenshot of scientific article from nature Medicine, as well as two panels from the study method and results

⚠️ Despite all the hype, chatbots still make terrible doctors. Out today is the largest user study of language models for medical self-diagnosis. We found that chatbots provide inaccurate and inconsistent answers, and that people are better off using online searches or their own judgment.

Your Iranian colleagues are cut off from family back home & are in a state of collective grief, which has many faces. We may appear more aloof or be more impatient, may self-isolate, have more typos, may freeze or overwork to numb the pain, or find fear, memory, or hope in unexpected moments.

Out now in Translational Psychiatry! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

U.S. Visa Bureaucracy and Its Burdens Among Early Career Scholars www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Makes perfect sense! so responses here can be a consequence of failure of contingency detection rather than the dissociation of the response from its outcome representation (similar to our findings about reduced S–O knowledge leading to habit-like responses rather than action slips) 💡

JOB ALERT: I am offering a 4-year funded PhD opportunity. The position is specifically linked to the project “Assessing the balance between goal-directed and habitual processing through the course of learning". The project is about learning habits and include eye tracking and pupillometry...

🚨 New publication: How to improve conceptual clarity in psychological science?

Thrilled to see this article with @ruimata.bsky.social out. We discuss how LLMs can be leveraged to map, clarify, and generate psychological measures and constructs.

Open access article: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Looks interesting! We have been facing this exact issue - finding big inconsistencies across different LLMs rating the same text.

Very cool paper! 🙌 Interesting that most participants accurately detected changes in contingency relationships, so the results are unrelated to understanding the task requirements

The degraded contingency test fails to detect habit induction in humans In experimental psychology and behavioral neuroscience, habits are considered stimulus-response (S-R) associations formed through extended reward training. Accordingly, habits are assessed using one o...

This article is now published in @plosone.org. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... New analysis added: seemingly habitual responses are explained because contingency deg didn't work for some participants (in line with recent outcome dev results in our lab and in @clairegillan.bsky.social lab)

Predictive Modelling of Depression Treatment Response using Individual Symptoms and Latent Factors Machine learning models have increasingly been used to identify predictors of treatment response in depression, and it is hoped that they may eventually help with clinical decision making. However, th...

Excited to share this new preprint on the Predictive Modelling of Depression Treatment Response using Individual Symptoms and Latent Factors with @clairegillan.bsky.social fresh up on @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Out today in Molecular Psychiatry our paper on multiverse computational factor modeling (i.e. a lotta lotta factor analyses). Thread below for the full rundown. Last PhD paper from @celinef.bsky.social YOU'RE FREE!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great news! Congrats, Ondrej ☘️

Photovoice Exhibition 29th - 31st October at Trinity Business school led by Dr. Claire Howlin. ‘How Music and Arts Support Neurodiversity’ will showcase photos and stories from neurodivergent adults about how creativity helps them thrive. Join us for the LAUNCH Oct 30th @dancingresearch.bsky.social

Now out in JEP: General, "How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently"

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Preprint with final version: osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/n

Sounds very exciting, go@dancingresearch.bsky.social! 🎶🎹 (love the hashtags btw #babyrave 🪩🍼👯)

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Hey everybody! @drjuliawester.bsky.social and I have a new paper!

We surveyed over 800 scientists, science communicators, and science educators who use social media.

Conclusion: Scientists no longer find Twitter useful or pleasant, and many have switched to Bluesky! 🧪🌎🦑

doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

Many congrats @ambercopeland.bsky.social 🙌🥳

New preprint from the lab on habit learning in compulsivity from the fantastic @kellydonegan.bsky.social! ✅ N=1000, ✅ pre-registered, ✅ within-person crossover design...we study individual differences in habit learning using the Neureka App

Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits Habits are the behavioral output of two brain systems. A stimulus–response (S–R) system that encourages us to efficiently repeat well-practiced actions in familiar settings, and a goal-directed system...

The good news? If there’s more than one mechanism driving compulsive behaviour, there’s likely more than one way to intervene! We talk about this in our @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social review @eikekofi.bsky.social @parnianrafei.bsky.social

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

🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨

Why do some people get stuck doing things that no longer make sense, or are even harmful? Our new study shows compulsivity isn’t just about weakened goal-directed control; people high in compulsivity also form stronger habits

📄: osf.io/preprints/ps...

#PaperFairy #Habits #CogSci

Thanks, maybe next time! 🙌

Very interesting findings that add relevant context to our results in this recent preprint (osf.io/preprints/ps...) about outcome devaluation protocol knowledge (lack thereof), which could be easily mistaken with "habitual responding"!

New preprint! Habits should get stronger with more practice, right? Well, this crucial result has been difficult to reproduce in human labs. In an instant classic, de Wit (2018) showed 5 failures in obtaining more evidence of habits in conditions with more training -as compared to little trained

In February 2024, I wrote Scientific Reports about a published meta-analysis claiming that mindfulness interventions affect neural plasticity, 'cementing the neuropsychological basis of mindfulness-based interventions'.

The paper was retracted yesterday—here a little summary of the process.🧵

You happen to be at #CPConf2025 and interested in habitual processes and how they contribute to compulsivity? We've gathered data from 180 individuals across three different compulsion types including phone-checking (not reflected in the DSM!). Come visit me at poster 2.46!

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

@glassybrain.bsky.social (Vanessa Teckentrup) will present "Understanding habitual properties of compulsivity using moment-to-moment experience sampling in daily life" with 6 weeks of EMA data tracking OCD, Binge-Eating and Phone-checking compulsions!📱https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yvhua_v1

@kellydonegan.bsky.social will present "Compulsivity is associated with an increase in stimulus- response habit learning"📱,which we are 🤏 close to pre-printing. So 🙏 give us your thoughts and ideas!