Shawn Rhoads

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning.

Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Job announcement 📢

@shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social and I are looking for a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction!

Interested? If you’ll be at #rlc2025 (or I missed you at #cogsci2025) feel free to reach out with any questions!

apply.interfolio.com/165809

#cogsci2025 #cpconf2025 #rldm2025 #rlc2025 #sne2025 #s4sn2025

📢 @markkho.bsky.social & I are recruiting a joint postdoc interested in computational models of social interaction & mental health

💻 Ideal candidates have experience w/ multi-player web-based experiments & computational modeling

📅 Apps are reviewed on a rolling basis

🔗 apply.interfolio.com/165809

🥳Excited to share that our new paper is live at Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social! We show that Pavlovian learning can grow empathy for another person. 🧵👇

Excited to share our new work at #CogSci2025!

We explore how people plan deceptive actions, and how detectives try to see through the ruse and infer what really happened based on the traces left behind. 🕵️‍♀️

Paper: osf.io/preprints/osf/vqgz5_v1
Code: github.com/cicl-stanford/recursive_deception

1/

The manuscript resubmitted to different journals

Thrilled that our paper on the mechanisms underlying social learning strategies is out! First big paper from my @erc.europa.eu & @kawresearch.bsky.social funded group. More to come! I'm currently looking to recruit two post docs, get in touch if you find this line of research interesting.

Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"!

Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Direct interactions between the human insula and hippocampus during memory encoding - Nature Neuroscience The hippocampus and insula communicate when processing emotional memories. Discrete sites in the human insular cortex showed changes that predicted later memory recall, while others responded to emoti...

Discrete sites in the human insular cortex showed changes of ac vity that predicted later memory recall, while others responded to emo onal content. Smula on of memoryrelated sites showed direct influence over the hippocampus

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An exciting collaboration is underway. @thetransmitter.bsky.social is partnering with @neuromatch.bsky.social to serve the computational neuroscience community and help connect neuroscientists across all career stages.
www.thetransmitter.org/neuromatch-p...

#neuroskyence

🚨 We’re hiring! The Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Virginia Tech is looking for a postdoc to join our team studying the neural + computational mechanisms of structure learning and flexible cognition: ccnvt.github.io#positions

Pending editorial decision

Perceived community alignment increases information sharing - Nature Communications Information sharing is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior. Here, the authors use neuroimaging and behavioral studies to show that people are driven to share information that they believe will be ...

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

A recently proposed «pseudosocial cognition approach» aims at our previous work on the social dimension of paranoia.

The shortcomings of their article raise important questions on how we all connect behavioural models to neural data.

Our letter of response: osf.io/preprints/ps...

summary 🧵👇

I have ANOTHER postdoc position open here: jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/250...

Please get in touch if you are interested in intracranial research into human cognition.

This just came out online - the prediction error story about delusions evolves and butts up against other accounts.
This came out too late for us to cite, but its entirely consistemt with our view of the mind and brain: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

We're hiring a transcranial magnetic stimulation assistant. Ideally a recent grad looking to work for a few years in New York before applying to medical or graduate school. Ample opportunities for presenting and publishing data. If aware of any excellent candidates, please forward!

bit.ly/4l5wzcW

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share
@seoyeonbae211.bsky.social's first preprint—an ambitious global study of human motivation!

Using data from 900,000+ people in 100+ countries, we find altruistic motives consistently outweigh egoistic ones across cultures.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Merchant et al. perform a meta-analytic investigation of neurocognitive systems involved in real-time social interaction doi.org/10.52294/001...

@fmri-today.bsky.social @mallarchak.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social

Screenshot of article summary of: Toward Science-Led Publishing by Damian Pattinson, George Currie published as an opinion piece, in Learned Publishing Summary The current dynamic of scholarly publishing prioritises the wants of the publishing industry over the needs of the research community. This article explores this theme through the lens of ‘publisher-led science’ as a description of our current status quo, and through ‘science-led publishing’ as an improved future state. We argue that financial motivations central to most publishing distort how research is presented, how it is assessed and even what research is undertaken, leading to a system that hinders, rather than facilitates, scientific progress. We propose three elements of a science-led publishing approach that would accelerate research communication, incentivise collaboration between authors, editors and reviewers, and create a more transparent and equitable research landscape. We believe that research funding and research assessment are two of the primary levers for wider change in research and research culture and consider the future purpose of scholarly publishing in a world where these proposals have been widely adopted.

Does publishing serve science or is science serving publishing?

Damian Pattinson and I (@elife.bsky.social) argue scientific publishing has evolved into a system that, rather than facilitate scholarly communication, distorts and dictates it.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

#OpenScience

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨

Thrilled to share new research on teaching!
Work supervised by
@cocoscilab.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and @markkho.bsky.social.

This project asks:
When do people teach by mentalizing vs with heuristics? 1/3

osf.io/preprints/os...

🧵New preprint!
Can experts accurately predict real-world effectiveness of 11 climate change interventions?

We ran a preregistered forecasting study with 862 participants and compared their predictions to real-world outcomes from 6,954 Americans.

What we found surprised us.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Prefrontal encoding of an internal model for emotional inference Nature - Neurons in the rodent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encode a flexible internal model of emotion by linking directly experienced and inferred associations with aversive experiences.

I’m excited to share a new paper from the lab. The study led by Xiaowei Gu reveals how the mPFC encodes complex emotional memories, using an internal model to infer emotional associations and memories via projections to the amygdala. a🧵(1/8)

rdcu.be/el19t

@cpsyjournal.bsky.social is switching to a paid peer reviewer system!!

Game changer for academic publishing 👏👏

cpsyjournal.org/articles/10....

One Small Step Towards Fixing a Broken System | Computational Psychiatry

🔥💥📣 Excited to announce a new policy at the Computational Psychiatry (CPSY) journal @cpsyjournal.bsky.social. Starting from April 2025, CPSY will compensate reviewers for their time and effort invested in reviewing manuscripts. w/ @drrickadams.bsky.social
cpsyjournal.org/articles/10....

Re-posting is appreciated: We have a fully funded PhD position in CMC lab @cmc-lab.bsky.social (at @tudresden_de). You can use forms.gle/qiAv5NZ871kv... to send your application and find more information. Deadline is April 30. Find more about CMC lab: cmclab.org and email me if you have questions.

Thanks so much for the kind words and for highlighting our work! :)