yinan cao

Are you #Coayne2026? Wanna know how we can have a common notion of state in mind and machines and find them in an unsupervised fashion with temporal embeddings based on dynamic similarity check @armanbehrad.bsky.social and @maxschwabe.bsky.social’s poster today, 3-001!

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Excited to share our new paper in @pnas.org with @bnmorillon.bsky.social &
@valentinwyart.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
We study three core inference systems, and how their interaction shapes human learning and decision-making.

🚨Four postdoc positions at the #ReasonableAI excellence cluster @tuda.bsky.social!
jobs.rhein-main-universitaeten.de/rmu/job/52370
Please share widely 🙏

Everyday decisions aim not only to earn rewards but also to learn about the world. Across 3 experiments (N = 702), we show that in reward-free settings, people adopt a two-stage epistemic policy: early "streaking" to test provisional hypotheses, followed by uncertainty-guided exploration.

🔎Updated preprint "Humans use a dual policy to improve inferences during epistemic information seeking" by Yinan Cao, Clémence Alméras, Junseok Lee, Inès Maye, and Valentin Wyart. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Marseille folks: I’m organizing a one-day workshop on Distributed Computations for Flexible Behavior (Apr 16, Timone Campus) with a great line-up of speakers bridging theory, circuits & whole-brain dynamics! 🧠

Free registration (mandatory, incl. lunch): fannycazettes.limesurvey.net/172448?lang=...

Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain - Nature Communications How humans process competing information when making multi-alternative decisions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that the brain resolves the trade-off between “evaluating within” and “comparin...

Cognition is not steady state.
Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

New paper on information sampling in multialternative choice, part of the ERC @erc.europa.eu Starting Grant "INFOSAMPLE".

One of projects emerging from the first semi-gigantic MEG dataset we collected as the "Irrationality" Lab in Hamburg, around COVID lockdowns.

Glad to see this paper out @natcomms.nature.com! in this work, we investigated neural sampling across multiple choice options (N > 2).

Amazing resources!

Inter-areal coupling for cognition through coincident oscillatory transients How do large-scale brain networks interact to enable cognition? Correlated oscillations, a mechanism for inter-areal interactions, can be expressed as phase coherence or amplitude co-fluctuations. Whi...

New Preprint alert 🚨
“Inter-areal coupling for cognition through coincident oscillatory transients” together with
@ycaoneuro.bsky.social
@ktsetsos.bsky.social
@donnerlab.bsky.social &
Andreas Engel
#MEG #neuroscience #bioRxiv

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

🧠 We’re hiring!
Join the Irrationality Lab @ Trinity College Dublin for ERC-funded postdoc positions in Decision Neuroscience.

Work with OPM-MEG + computational modeling to uncover how the brain shapes, maintains and revises preferences.

Apply & info: www.ktsetsoslab.net/_files/ugd/0...
#NeuroJobs

Damn I hope this is true. Can we REALLY trust this?

Collective intelligence in animals and robots - Nature Communications This commentary explores how collective intelligence arises from local interactions in animal groups and how these principles inform the design of swarm robotic systems, addressing the challenge of ac...

Comment by Prof @icouzin.bsky.social that explores how collective intelligence emerges from local interactions in animal groups, and how these principles inform the design of swarm robotic systems. @natureportfolio.nature.com
@natcomms.nature.com #robotics
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Postdoc Position: Neural Circuitry Underlying Working Memory | Radboud University Do you want to work as a Postdoc Position: Neural Circuitry Underlying Working Memory at the Faculty of Social Sciences? Check our vacancy!

🚨🧠🚨 POSTDOC POSITION 🚨🧠🚨 in my lab: www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Connectivity in Working Memory. Deadline 12 Nov! Apply via website; please repost.

Decision Making This book offers reports on new findings relating to mechanisms of decisions, modeling of decision making and impaired decision making upon diseases.

🚀Our new chapter is out, “Perspectives on the Mechanistic Underpinnings of Choice Biases,” written with @ktsetsos.bsky.social and published in Decision Making: Mechanisms and Applications (edited by Carsten Murawski, Ulrich Ettinger, and Bert Heinrichs): link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Noise ceilings are really useful: You can estimate the reliability of your data and get an index of how well your model can possibly perform given the noise in the data.

But, contrary to what you may think, noise ceilings do not provide an absolute index of data quality.

Let's dive into why. 🧵

first paper with valentin wyart.

Confirmation bias through selective readout of information encoded in human parietal cortex Nature Communications - People often discard incoming information when it contradicts their pre-existing beliefs about the world. Here, the authors show that this discarded information is precisely...

1/ New paper by Hame Park, (@AraziAyelet), Bharath Talluri, Marco Celotto, Stefano Panzeri, Alan Stocker & Tobias Donner published in Nature Communications – “Confirmation Bias through Selective Readout of Information Encoded in Human Parietal Cortex”: rdcu.be/etlR7. Here is a summary:

My small tribute to one of my favourite papers ever

“Legal decisions are not totally arbitrary, like a lottery. However, they still fall short of the expected standards”
—often through irrelevant influences, like cognitive biases:

buff.ly/o2uruLU

Why Are We Professors Doing “Research As Usual” While AI Systems Advance at Breakneck Speed? Introduction

. @kordinglab.bsky.social 's substack is great. Lots of food for thought from one of the most piercing thinkers in NeuroAI. kording.substack.com/p/why-are-we...

Concurrent selection of internal goals and external sensations during visual search Flexible goal-directed behaviour relies on the selective processing of internal goal representations and external sensations. Yet, internal and external selection processes have classically been studi...

Our latest findings showing how internal and external visual selection do not necessarily ‘take turns’ but can run in parallel, led by @baiweiliu.bsky.social.

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

The behavioral mechanisms governing collective motion in swarming locusts Collective motion, which is ubiquitous in nature, has traditionally been explained by “self-propelled particle” models from theoretical physics. Here we show, through field, lab, and virtual reality e...

Scientists use VR + lab + field study to rewrite the rules of locust swarming 🦗🦗

Latest @science.org from first author @sercansayin.bsky.social and #Konstanz team ⬇️

@einatcouzin.bsky.social @icouzin.bsky.social @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚀 New paper out in Psychological Review!

How does learning change across the lifespan? We propose that resource rationality—adapting belief updating to cognitive limitations—can explain age-related differences in learning.

📖 doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

👇 A short thread:

Mice dynamically adapt to opponents in competitive multi-player games Competing for resources in dynamic social environments is fundamental for survival, and requires continuous monitoring of both 'self' and 'others' to guide effective choices. Yet our understanding of ...

First preprint from our lab! An @jerlich.bsky.social collaboration

We developed novel frameworks to study multi-agent decisions in mice.

Mice flexibly shift their decision preference under social competition, by integrating real-time self and opponent information!

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

Understanding learning through uncertainty and bias - Communications Psychology Flexible learning requires humans to adjust their behaviour to uncertainty. While normative learning models explain many adaptive behaviours, systematic biases-arising from inaccurate assumptions or c...

In our new @commspsychol.bsky.social review, we explore how humans adjust learning to different types of uncertainty, why biases arise, and what this reveals about learning and psychiatric conditions.

📖 Read more: nature.com/articles/s44...

With Matt Nassar & @haukeren.bsky.social

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

We have an opening for a 12 month Research Assistant post, funded by an ERC grant. The postholder would help with several neuroimaging projects, including MEG and 7T fMRI. Please repost and share with anyone who may be interested. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... #neuroskyence #Neuroimaging

Latent circuit inference from heterogeneous neural responses during cognitive tasks - Nature Neuroscience The latent circuit model identifies low-dimensional mechanisms of task execution from heterogenous neural responses. This approach reveals a latent inhibitory mechanism for context-dependent decisions...

The latent circuit model identifies low-dimensional mechanisms of task execution from heterogeneous neural responses. This approach revealed a latent inhibitory mechanism for context-dependent decisions in neural network models and prefrontal cortex 🧪🧠

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