Here's a short dynamics-based explanation of the equation e^(πi)=-1

Cumulative culture must withstand environmental change🌍How? One possibility: people have many learning strategies at their disposal🧠 Imitation is optimal in stable environments. When circumstances change, causal models can help🌟 Work with @fierycushman! escholarship.org/uc/item/78c4w1…

1/ How do we make decisions when there are a crippling number of options to consider? 😵‍💫 So excited to share my first ever tweet and preprint w/coauthors Max Langenkamp Max Kleiman-Weiner Tuomas Oikarinen and @fierycushman psyarxiv.com/jqhac

New preprint with Caroline I Jahn on how the brain learns to control attention in a changing environment! We find attention is learned incrementally from reward feedback, and it maps stimuli into a generalized space that can guide decisions in many settings. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

✨ Now out in Psychological Review! ✨ We present a new account of relevance that weighs both **epistemic** and **decision-theoretic** utility: statements are relevant if they improve the listener’s future decision-making. tedsumers.info/_files/ugd/290…

The notion that goals are central to human cognition is intuitive, yet learning and decision-making researchers have often overlooked the topic. In this Trends in Cognitive Sciences article, Anne Collins and I propose it’s time to start studying goals in their own right authors.elsevier.com/a/1hjzw4sIRvPN…

Registration for general attendance now open for this year's mathematics of neuroscience conference: neuromonster.org We've got a full schedule of great talks, and would love to have you join us! Also accepting physical/virtual poster submissions until Sept 20th.

I'm pleased to announce that our work on optimal metacognitive control of memory recall has been published in Psych Review! psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi…

Our article, "Identifying Resource-Rational Heuristics For Risky Choice" just got accepted in Psychological Review thanks to the hard work of Fred Callaway & Paul Krueger, who did most of the work, and Tom Griffiths, who co-supervised the project with me. doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.…

I’m recruiting PhD students to help launch the Exploration, Learning, and Mind Lab at University of New Hampshire Psych in Fall 2024! Check out our lab website at liquinlab.github.io for more info, and feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in applying!

Really excited to share our new paper where we use a reinforcement learning model to demonstrate that rational adaptation to an unpredictable early life environment can produce key characteristics of anhedonia. (1/10) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/to…

While it’s *deeply* unfashionable to be publishing in eLife - the journal right now - do humour us for advertising a study that was several years in the making (submitted way back when it was still possible for reviewers to reject us!). We’re rather proud of it.🧵👇🧵doi.org/10.7554/eLife.…

Our paper on optimal nudging is out in Psych Review! We use resource-rational analysis to formalize nudges and predict their effects. We also show how to use this approach to automatically construct *optimal* nudges that best improve choice. With Fred Callaway and Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab

In this paper, we show how people reuse hierarchical structure while solving problems, using a program-writing task (lightbot) and a grammar induction model (adaptor grammar).

Our new preprint (collaboration with Claire Gillan @celinefox_ and Sam Gilbert) explores the complex relationship between metacognition, compulsivity and the utilization of external reminders. (1/7)

Institutions should reflect on this wisdom: nature.com/articles/d4158… Institutions have an incentive to make their contribution externally legible by proliferating centrally organized programs. I believe this paradoxically reduces the quality of research it's meant to support.

Mark is a wonderful person and scientist. I highly recommend this postdoc opportunity.

Reminder that by staying on twitter, academics are giving this guy money and power. Bluesky is excellent software—it just needs users!

Just walked out of a set at The Comedy Cellar (nyc) where the comic (Lenny Marcus) was doing a long bit mocking homeless people. Most of the audience was laughing. Pretty hard to be hopeful about the future right now...

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉 tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2xLNA