Uma Karmarkar

hot off the press: huge infestation of crooked editors involved on paper mills unmasked. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Oh no, I'm so very sorry for the chaos this causes.

Subscribe to Clarkesworld Magazine Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

So apparently, if I don't keep encouraging people to subscribe to Clarkesworld, they don't.

clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/

All new subscriptions go towards increasing staff pay. They deserve it, so I can't be silent.

I internalized how lethal a moose interaction can be because we were playing the game Ravine a lot for a while. The moose card means you lose. Every time.

Oh, heck, I should have gotten a clearer shot of the artist's name when I took the picture. I'm sorry I don't know, agreed it's a cool image!

Co-signed. I'm a marketing professor and neuroeconomist - I study how people use information to make real world decisions.

Not everyone is vulnerable to all persuasion tactics. But everyone is vulnerable to some persuasion tactics.

Get you a girl who knows what both an axolotl and the Circle of Willis look like.

ON the left, a sketch of an axolotl in red pencil. On the right, an anatomical diagram of the Circle of Willis (a set of blood vessels providing primary blood supply to the brain).

At a cafe this morning -

Me : <squinting> did someone...frame a drawing of the Circle of Willis on the wall?

Spouse:

Me : No, sorry, I think that's an axolotl

Spouse: *Why are you like this*

(Okay, but like, I think I have a point, just look at the pictures)

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

This is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours:

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

🧠📈 🧪

Everyone please enjoy this moment of marketing hilarity with me.

CANNOT UNSEE

The blue back is cool! Looks intentional.

HOW DO I LOG IN TO EDITORIAL MANAGER TO SUBMIT MY REVIEW

A wonderful article on work (both old and new) pushing the frontier of memory research.

More jobs-that-tempt-me-to-leave-current-job postings!

I mean, how great would your linkedin profile be if it led with "Nike Neuro"?

Elections - Society For Neuroeconomics

Society for Neuroecon board nominations are open!

Please send in nominations, including for yourself!!

I still sometimes hear people say they feel weird about self-nominating, but we genuinely appreciate it- we want people who want to help move the org forward!

neuroeconomics.org/elections/

Super useful cross-sample info in this pre-print:

Cohen, @klempert.bsky.social, Wolk & Kable compare age-dependent diffs in cognition, personality and political orientation across six online platforms (Turk, Qualtrics Panels, etc.)

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy A.I. programming in the 1980s, with the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man each responding differently to the player's real-time movements.

This is an insane thing to write about game development. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/a...

If you were alive in the 1980s, this is among the most wonderful & truly incredible things you have ever witnessed in your lifetime.

re: Carla - yes.

re: this product - years back one of my students' final project groups came up with a similar idea. Everyone loved it, but worried that the market wasn't ready for it.

Very hopeful we're ready now!

Not gonna lie, if the job was in CA, I'd consider sending in my own resume.

Marketing colleagues in NYC - got friends who might fit? Happy to chat with anyone interested in applying if I can help on the neuro or the marketing side.

I would read the hell out of a marketing paper on developing pricing for AI either from a quant or from a behavioral perspective.

Why Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete—It’s Not Rocket Science—Or AI It’s Not Rocket Science That Is Making Millions Of Managers Obsolete. Or Even AI. Traditional Managers Have Simply Got The Wrong Goal

Forbes is suggesting neuroecon offers new thinking that will help managers/biz move strategy to "the right problem":

Creating value for the customer.

^This is also known as the first sentence of every MBA marketing class/text for the last several decades.

www.forbes.com/sites/steved...

Okay, ew, but SUPER USEFUL. Thank you @scrippsocean.bsky.social

The $19 Strawberry That Went Viral. The Egg Prices Everyone’s Talking About. An Expert Explains Why A $19 strawberry from Erewhon and the rising cost of everyday staples have turned grocery prices into a cultural flashpoint. Neuroeconomist Uma Karmarkar unpacks why these moments strike such a nerve—...

I am endlessly fascinated by grocery shopping. It's such a complex set of decisions! But also a common, taken-for-granted task.

So why would *groceries* go viral?

I talked to UCSD writer Sara Bock about price shocks, psychological safety and prediction error:

today.ucsd.edu/story/19-dol...

Yes, I have run fMRI studies. However, I have always been, and will always be afraid of the magnet.

Uncertainty can increase neural activity in areas also associated with fear. But drawing conclusions about this requires resting unpleasantly hard on reverse inference.

More elegant answers would probably come from someone like Ifat Levy at Yale

levydecisionlab.org

I am not sure that "tagged" is the right conceptual model.

Psychiatry absolutely does look into this. From my perspective, it's important to be precise about the definition/flavor of "uncertainty" of interest. Aleatoric? Epistemic? Affect(ive)? Ambiguity aversion?

THIS. The pleasure of certainty is right there in Prospect Theory. It's there in Ellsberg's paradox.

It's there in my own ambiguity papers showing we have a measurable financial value for pos *and* neg information if it makes us feel more certain.

Certainty is a hell of a drug.

YouTube tops the list of the online platforms we asked about in our survey. Nine-in-ten teens report using the site, slightly down from 95% in 2022. TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat remain widely used among teens. Roughly six-in-ten teens say they use TikTok and Instagram, and 55% say the same for Snapchat. Facebook and X use have steeply declined over the past decade. Today, 32% of teens say they use Facebook. This is down from 71% in 2014-15, though the share of teens who use the site has remained stable in recent years. And 17% of teens say they use X (formerly Twitter) – about half the share who said this a decade ago (33%), and down from 23% in 2022. Roughly one-quarter of teens (23%) say they use WhatsApp, up 6 percentage points since 2022. And 14% of teens use Reddit, a share that has remained stable over the past few years. We asked about Threads, launched by parent company Meta in 2023, for the first time this year. Only 6% of teens report using it.

Where the teens are
YouTube 90%
TikTok 63%
Instagram 61%
Snapchat 55%
Facebook 32% (down from 71%)
WhatsApp 23%
X 17% (down from 33%)
Reddit 14%
Threads 6%
report: www.pewresearch.org/internet/202...

both would be appreciated