Are humans behaving more like foragers even on typical reinforcement learning tasks? Work by Zid et al. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our newest preprint explores whether feelings (affect) may be the only form of value you need to motivate thoughts and actions. "The affective gradient hypothesis: An affect-centered account of motivated behavior." osf.io/preprints/psya… See 🧵 below to learn more:

Prediction is likely the most basic cognitive process, but we almost always think of it as applied forwards In some environments, though, it's more efficient to apply it backwards - estimating the actions that will likely precede a given outcome It turns out that's what we do👇

I am so excited to be part of this fantastic project. Submit your work and join us NeurIPS Conference in Vancouver!

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 “Considering information-sharing motives to reduce misinformation” out now in Current Opinion in Psychology with affective.brain. doi.org/10.1016/j.cops… (1/n)

Beyond discrete-choice options Review by AH Hadian Rasanan , NJ Evans, laura fontanesi, @CManningPhD, C Huang-Pollock, @dora_matzke, Andrew Heathcote, Jörg Rieskamp, Maarten Speekenbrink, MJ Frank, Stefano Palminteri (@stepalminteri.bsky.social), C Lucas, J Busemeyer, R Ratcliff, & JA Rad tinyurl.com/3dsbs3zm

Computational psychiatry friends: I am teaching a seminar on CPSY for the 2nd time (previous: 2021) and want to update my syllabus. Can you help? What are your favorites* (can be your own papers!) on the following: *Ideally: easy to read & informative on both model and disorder

The affective gradient hypothesis: an affect-centered account of motivated behavior Opinion by Amitai Shenhav (Amitai Shenhav) Free access before Nov 13: authors.elsevier.com/a/1jpv%7E_V1r-…

Our paper on the Affective Gradient Hypothesis is now out on Trends in Cognitive Sciences! 🧠 ➡️sciencedirect.com/science/articl… For a short summary of how this theory originated and what it proposes, see this 🧵: x.com/amitaishenhav/…

I’m thrilled to see this out now, & couldn’t be happier that it landed in TiCS! I already wrote a 🧵on the positive case I’m making (below). I want to briefly elaborate on the negative case: why the status quo on goals & value is in need of a new account. From my conclusion:

Super happy to share this paper with Lucia Ricciardi and Bart Swinnen and others looking anxiety in PD! Turns out that basal ganglia theta indexes trait anxiety in 3 independent cohorts. academic.oup.com/brain/advance-…

.Moshe Glickman and affective.brain reveal a human-AI feedback loop, where AI amplifies subtle human biases, which are then further internalized by humans. This cycle increases human bias over time across domains. nature.com/articles/s4156…

New(ish) paper w/ affective.brain & Bastien Blain in Scientific Reports! We find that during stress (both COVID and personal events), people search for more “How” questions online. This shift indicates a heightened demand for actionable info. Link: nature.com/articles/s4159… 🧵1/3

The metabolic costs of cognition Review by Sharna D. Jamadar (Sharna Jamadar), Anna Behler (@Anna_NeuroSci), Hamish Deery (Hamish Deery), & Michael Breakspear (Michael Breakspear) Free access before March 4: tinyurl.com/47c9n65w

Very pleased to start a 5-year research program using data science to investigate the role of instability in severe mental illness. If you/someone you know want to join the team, PM me (recruitment starts soon). Thanks to Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, Oxford Psychiatry, and Sir Jules Thorn Charity

🧠 One of the key limitation of LLMs today is their lack of metacognition: they were (mostly) not trained to know what they know or don't know, what they can or can't do. 🚀At Inria Flowers team, we're proposing an approach to build metacognition into LLMs: MAGELLAN !

Origins and consequences of cognitive fatigue Feature Review by Mathias Pessiglione, Bastien Blain (Bastien Blain), Antonius Wiehler (Antonius Wiehler), & Shruti Naik Free access before May 20: tinyurl.com/2va75b5j

I am SO excited to share my latest #preprint with collaborators Robb Rutledge, zeb kurth-nelson, Martin Chadwick, summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, and others from DeepMind: "Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence" arxiv.org/abs/2504.02091 A short 🧵 1/7

Exciting new project led by Joey Heffner showing prediction errors can explain happiness in human-AI interactions. Builds off our recent work linking mood & language led by Jihyun K. Hur doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2… If we want AI to increase well-being, we need to measure it.