Marco K Wittmann

Two side-by-side images depicting the nested hierarchical IPOMDP and the non-hierarchical x-IPOMDP mechanism.

What happens when we can't use recursive belief to compete? We can use anomaly detection instead!

Here, we (led by soon-to-be-Dr @nitalon.bsky.social ) devise a multi-agent account where compression & reward expectation are used to notice deception

jair.org/index.php/ja...

Very much looking forward to this talk and interesting chats!

Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences Nature Communications - Normative theory predicts that feedback should not affect decisions under risk, but past findings disagree. Here, the authors show that feedback shifts risk-taking by...

🧵 New paper in @NatureComms
Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences
Nasioulas, Potier, Cerrotti, Lebreton & me (2026)
Does feedback really improve risky decision-making? Short answer: no! it changes attitudes, not learning. 👇
rdcu.be/e0VcO

Join us at the Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Summer School in picturesque Bad Bevensen for two weeks of intense exchange about Systems Neuroscience!
When: 26 July - 7 August
Where: Bad Bevensen, Germany
Application deadline: 28 February
More details here: www.dpz.eu/pcn2026

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺

This Friday, January 30th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Michael Browning giving a talk entitled "Mechanisms and actions of dopaminergic agonists in the treatment of depression"

In person or online. For more information:
www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event

Stefano Palminteri – Medium Read writing from Stefano Palminteri on Medium. Behavioral and computational scientist interested in understanding how humans and machines make decisions and in the history and philosophy of science.

I’ve started posting on Medium, sharing pieces that sit between academic writing and a broader audience. Topics will likely include decision science, AI, and the history & philosophy of science. First article is up (link below).
medium.com/@stefano.pal...

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺

This Friday, January 23rd, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Ayelet Landau giving a talk entitled "Rhythmic attention negotiates competition along the visual hierarchy"

In person or online. For more information:
www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event

We're running a 5th edition of the always-exciting UCL Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition this year, 8th-10th July 2026 in London. Accommodation and travel expenses are covered.

For more information and how to apply, check out metacoglab.org/summer-schoo...

Exciting new work by @lspiering.bsky.social showing that people intentionally generate variability in their own behaviour to discern causal consequences in social interactions; because big variability makes cause-effect relationships detectable, while small variability gets lost in noise. 🅰️ ➡️ 🅱️

UCL researchers uncover distinct brain changes in Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia UCL researchers have used advanced brain imaging to uncover the distinct brain changes between people with Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, opening the door to more targeted treatments

Really excited to share first published paper of the year! Thank you to @uclbrainscience.bsky.social for highlighting: www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc.... We found different organisational changes in Lewy body disease patients with dementia versus those with intact cognition, using structural gradients.

Low socioeconomic status amplifies the perceived rarity of large rewards Decision-making relies on heuristics derived from past experiences that likely vary with socioeconomic status. We investigate socioeconomic difference…

NEW: We show and replicate socioeconomic gradients in heuristics for decision-making under uncertainty, possibly reflecting adaptations varying levels of scarcity and competition for resources 🫰
Shoutout and thanks to @danielnettle.bsky.social & @coraliechevallier.bsky.social ❤️‍🔥

tinyurl.com/mu7rzz6k

Dorsal striatal dopamine integrates sensory and reward prediction errors to guide perceptual decisions Perceptual decisions are shaped by expectations about sensory stimuli and rewards, learned through sensory and reward prediction errors. Dopamine is known to convey reward prediction errors that shape...

New preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚀 Excited to announce that I'm looking for people (PhD/Postdoc) to join my Cognitive Modelling group @uniosnabrueck.bsky.social.

If you want to join a genuinely curious, welcoming and inclusive community of Coxis, apply here:
tinyurl.com/coxijobs

Please RT - deadline is Jan 4‼️

NEPTUNE project logo with affiliations & funders

New job alert 💫 We’re hiring a 3-year postdoc for the NEPTUNE project to study the causal mechanisms of paranoia and social learning.

Work with us on experimental psychopharmacology (THC), social cognition, and psychosis 🧑‍🔬

Apply here: lnkd.in/gQqnNvjR](my.corehr.com/pls/kclrecru...)

Please RT :)

PhD Studentship: Social Learning of Metacognition and Awareness at Birkbeck, University of London jobs.ac.uk now advertising a PhD Studentship: Social Learning of Metacognition and Awareness Visit jobs.ac.uk to apply and to browse more PhD opportunities.

I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk

More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p...

#cogsci #neuroskyence

A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions Flexible behaviour requires transforming abstract cognitive representations, such as value preferences, into concrete motor actions. During economic decision-making, individuals evaluate options to gu...

New preprint from the lab!
A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We use a novel task in mice, cortex-wide imaging and optogenetics, NPX recording and modelling to reveal a circuit mechanism that transforms abstract decisions to spatial actions.

Amazing!!! Congrats! 🥳

Children love animals. How do they turn into meat-eating adults? We investigate how children trade off their moral values with the importance of food for human traditions. The great Alex Carter's first PhD paper now out in SPPS: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #socialpsyc #devpsy #philsky

Very cool brain meeting coming up this Friday with Andrew MacAskill presenting exciting work on the rodent hippocampus' role in latent state inference in the service of decision making. Obligatory for people who study reversal learning.

👇 Few days left to apply to get to work with us ! Get in touch if you have any questions

Really excited to see this preprint out! Fernanda did an amazing job at demonstrating how you can accurately predict retinotopy from T1w scans alone. This is important for several reasons: 1/4

Non-invasive ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human nucleus accumbens impacts reward sensitivity - Nature Communications This study shows that non-invasive ultrasound to the human nucleus accumbens can modulate deep brain activity and enhance reward-guided learning, offering a potential alternative to invasive neuromodu...

New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.

Very proud to be part of this team! 🤓Our new preprint is out, where we examine how social basis functions develop during adolescence. 🥳🥳

Continuous dynamics of cooperation and competition in social decision-making - Communications Psychology Using a continuous social foraging game, this study shows that human pairs adopt stable cooperative, competitive, or mixed strategies. A computational model predicts dyadic choices and links these str...

This study shows that human pairs adopt stable cooperative, competitive, or mixed strategies. A computational model predicts dyadic choices and links these strategies to interaction dynamics, payoffs, and cost of cooperation.
@violapriesemann.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Did cooperation evolve because of conflict? Or is conflict an (avoidable) ‘by-product’ of evolved capacities to cooperate. I think the latter—>

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Check out this preprint by @simyciri.bsky.social on the role of basis functions in social decision-making across development 🚀!

** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)

New work with @simyciri.bsky.social. Adults make more accurate decisions than adolescents—yet show more intrusion from irrelevant players. We explain this paradox via efficient information compression: adults rely on combinatorial social basis functions that use group structure as a mental scaffold.

Come work with us!

I'm recruiting PhD students for my lab at Northwestern! I'm reviewing applications for the Department of Psychology for the Cognitive Affective Neuroscience and Clinical areas, due 12/1. 🧠

Come join the CATS Lab: nucatslab.com

Learn about our latest research: iamh.northwestern.edu/research/res...