Alexander Schakowski

Deadline tomorrow!

💥 Our new paper (with ‪@lucasmolleman.bsky.social and ‪@bjornlindstrom.bsky.social‬) is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com‬ 🥳 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠 Here, we advance a novel RL account—the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model—that explains how people learn to learn from others! 🤝

🧵👇

Great explainer for our new @nathumbehav.nature.com paper!

We've wrapped the first run of Unraveling Behavior! 🎙️ Now planning next steps—your feedback helps shape the future + funding.
👉 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆: survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/25...

Postdoctoral Researcher in psychology/cognitive science with focus on social learning and cultural evolution Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? The Mechanisms of Social Behavior lab at the Karolinska Institutet (PI: Björn Lindström) in Stockholm, Sweden is seeking a highly qualified

💥New postdoc position! 💥

Join us to explore how people learn from each other—and how that drives cultural evolution.

Run experiments, build computational models & collaborate across Europe w. @lucasmolleman.bsky.social
📍 Stockholm
More info: shorturl.at/CY4wk

Our #study finds that #male #dominance isn't the norm among #primates, and starts to unravel what shapes flexibility in intersexual power

paper (OA) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500405122

press release https://www.mpg.de/24986976/0630-evan-beyond-the-alpha-male-150495-x?c=2249

The deadline has been extended until July 16th!

👉 PhDs: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

🤩IT'S A PREPRINT 😍
Adolescents' social sensitivity isn't a bad thing—it's adaptive! In our new study, led by amazing Andrea Gradassi @connectedmindslab.bsky.social, we show that teens learned to copy successful peers faster than adults in a new multiplayer exploration task.
osf.io/preprints/os...

Dynamic strategic social learning in nest-building zebra finches and its generalisability Animals often balance asocial and social information strategically, adjusting when and from whom they copy based on context. Yet the cognition driving this dynamic—and its broader implications—remains...

👇 New #preprint combining computational models with zebbie data: "Dynamic strategic social learning in nest-building zebra finches and its generalisability".

🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧵1/n

🚨 3-year Postdoc Position at MPIB Berlin @mpib-berlin.bsky.social (deadline: 15 July)

We're hiring a postdoc to study why some citizens in Germany have become disillusioned with liberal democracy and shared reality, and how these shifts relate to social media use and broader societal polarization.

🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀
I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales
👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

I'll be presenting two posters at #RLDM2025 in Dublin🇮🇪 – June 11, Poster Session 1:

🌀 Poster #19: How selective attention benefits and hinders learning in complex environments.

🏞️ Poster #18: NorMARL - a framework for sustaining shared resources through norm internalization.

Preprint @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social arising from @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social animal welfare workshops. How can we develop a better error culture in animal biologging where we can learn from our, and others, mistakes and experiences?

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

AI generated image showing flock of sheep, shoal of fish, flock of birds and swarm robots

1/3

www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate...

PhD studentship! Comparative Analysis and Modelling of Collective Behaviour in Natural and Artificial Systems.

**this scholarship for UK residents only, as defined by UKCISA regulations**

Details below! Please RT

(AI-generated image)

Baboons walk in line for friendship, not survival, new study finds Researchers at Swansea University have discovered that baboons walk in lines, not for safety or strategy, but simply to stay close to their friends.

New paper in @behavecol.bsky.social (link: academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...)
led by PhD student @marcofele.bsky.social using hard-won data from our amazing baboon team. Our @swanseauni.bsky.social press release:
www.swansea.ac.uk/press-office...
We introduce the idea of a "social spandrel".....

Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social

We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits.

The result? Not really.

A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Pan-African metapopulation model explains Homo sapiens genetic and morphological evolution Emerging evidence has challenged the traditional view of a single-region origin for Homo sapiens, suggesting instead that our species arose and diversified across multiple geographically distinct popu...

🚨NEW PAPER from the @eegcam.bsky.social!🚨I have never been as proud of something as of the work that finally we can share today: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - we show how a climatically driven Pan African meta population model explains our species genetic and morphological diversity 🧬💀

🔷New in Biological Psychiatry🔷

**Old Strategies, New Environments: Reinforcement Learning on Social Media**

In this Review, we argue that the computational framework of Reinforcement Learning can help us understand social media behaviour:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨New podcast episode!!🚨

Ralph Hertwig calls for a shift from nudging to boosting—empowering people with the skills to make informed decisions. It’s a transparent way to strengthen agency in the face of challenges like misinformation, climate change, and more.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9r-...

Job announcement 🚨: paid fieldwork opportunity with Sanguatsiniq research project! Details in thread ⬇️ Please share!

How to improve conceptual clarity in psychology?

Excited to share a new preprint with @ruimata.bsky.social, discussing approaches based on large language models as possible solutions.

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

New preprint! 🚨How do groups process information? What does it mean for part of a network to "explore" and part to "exploit"? How do we move beyond phenomenological correlation in our analyses of networks to a causal theory of collective intelligence?

Here, we try to answer these questions:

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science:
How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

Very proud of our first eye-tracking study where we show how attention shape value encoding and normalisation in human reinforcement learning. Strikingly we show that injecting eye tracking data to the model improve choice fitting.

Work by @romanececchi.bsky.social w/ @sgluth.bsky.social

Interested in learning how to apply computational models to social and collective behavior? Apply for COSMOS Tokyo 🇯🇵 by APRIL 25TH 🚀 👉 cosmossummerschool.github.io As always, it's free to attend, we provide housing, & with the support of @eslr.bsky.social we will offer a number of travel stipends

We still have 5 more days to the deadline!! Submit a brief cover letter, cv, and one reference letter! #COSMOSTOKYO2025

Many thanks to the EHBEA 2025 attendees who trusted me with the Best Poster Award (Public vote)! 🌿

It is the first time I present my own data and truly lead the project, and your questions and insights came really helpful.

@ehbea.bsky.social
@ehbea2025.bsky.social
@ninedtp.bsky.social

Sexual division of labour shapes hunter-gatherer spatial ranges Mobility lies at the adaptive core of the hunter-gatherer foraging niche, and has shaped the cultural and genetic evolution of our species. Yet, the specific drivers and consequences of mobility are s...

🚨New preprint!🚨"Sexual division of labour shapes hunter-gatherer spatial ranges". Following on the sexual division of labour theme, finally out our analyses on the lifetime spatial ranges of over 700 Mbendjele BaYaka 🤩

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Title of the new paper. Available here https://www.pt.ffri.hr/pt/article/view/1101

Many fields use video coding + interrater reliability. But: how reliable are those reliability tests?

No standards exist for sample size, clip choice, or metrics - a blind spot.

We present BRAVO—a first workflow to improve reliability by restricting coders DOF.

[Paper is OA]

#Reproducibility

Can we detect signals of social and physiological states contagion during social foraging ? 🤔 With the right quantitative and analytical tools we can detect them . If you want to pursue similar type of questions , check out this postdoc position