Evan Russek

Does depression involve altered evaluation of multi-step plans?

In our new preprint, we find that individuals with higher apathy-anhedonia report more pessimism about whether a plan will succeed, but in fact make better decisions that are more reflective of accurate multi-step evaluations.

3. Individual differences in decision-making and mental-health

4. Social decision-making

1. Testing complex models of planning using massive online game datasets (e.g., chess, Go)

2. Understanding how cognitive maps are shaped to enable adaptive planning

I will likely be able to recruit a PhD student in the upcoming cycle. Please get in touch if you're interested in any of the following areas:

Thrilled to announce that I'll be starting in January 2026 as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York.

The lab will study the thought processes that underlie our decision-making.

Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, Tenure Track Department Cognitive Science Vassar College is dedicated to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees and welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds. Deci...

Vassar College is hiring a tenure track assistant professor in cognitive science. vassar.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Vassar...

I'll be at #CogSci2025 - happy to chat about the position and life at Vassar.

A smiling researcher at CogSci 2025 stands indoors wearing their scientific poster draped like a cape, with charts, graphs, and text visible on the fabric. The background shows a spacious conference hall with people walking and blurred architectural details.

A research poster draped like a cape, showing charts, graphs, and text about collaborative memory and decision-making. The poster includes colorful data plots, grid diagrams, and sections labeled “Introduction,” “Results,” “Model Benchmark,” and “Conclusions.” The bottom includes the researcher’s contact information and social links

Because nothing says “ready to present” like literally wearing your findings at #CogSci2025

Ham Huang leveled up from poster session to superhero mode! 🦸

🚨New preprint! WHEN should we plan toward a goal? Most research focuses on how and where to plan, but the timing of planning initiation has been overlooked. We show humans leverage a cognitive map - called model-based meta-control - to learn when to deploy a plan.
🧵(1/15)
osf.io/preprints/ps...

We have an amazing group of speakers spanning psychology and AI research, all focused on using Chess or other multi-player games to gain insights on human and AI decision-making, and how they can inform each other.

Chess @ RLDM Workshop Description Chess presents an intriguing case study in complex decision-making and multi-step planning. Historically, the psychology underlying chess play has been a topic of great interest,...

So excited for our #RLDM2025 workshop on Thursday, Chess as a bridge between human cognition and artificial intelligence, co-organized with Ionatan Kuperwajs.

sites.google.com/nyu.edu/ches...

I'm thrilled to announce that I will start as an Assistant Professor in Psychology & Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona in Jan 2026! My lab will investigate human planning and decision making through a combination of computational models, behavior, and fMRI (1/2)

Introspective access to value-based multi-attribute choice processes - Nature Communications People routinely choose between multi-attribute options, such as which movie to watch. Here, the authors show people often have accurate insight into their choices, challenging the notion that people ...

Are we “strangers to ourselves”? Classic theories say people have limited insight into how they decide. Our new paper at @natcomms.nature.com challenges this view. With @rcarl.bsky.social sky.social, @hedykober.bsky.social y.social, and @mjcrockett.bsky.social

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

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nice! congrats!

Despite the world being on fire, I can't help but be thrilled to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Dartmouth in Fall '26. I'll be recruiting grad students this upcoming cycle—get in touch if you're interested!

We are excited to post a new preprint with Shiyi Liang @shiyiliang.bsky.social:

'Reinforcement learning is positively associated with anhedonia symptoms' osf.io/preprints/ps...
(a bit late here – a version was online back in December)

@mpc-comppsych.bsky.social

So sorry for your loss, Laurence.

Figure 1. A schematic depiction of a model-mechanism mapping between a human learning system (left side) and a cognitive model (right side). Candidate model mechanism mappings are pictured as mapping between representations but also can be in terms of input data, architecture, or learning objective.

Figure 2. Data efficiency in human learning. (left) Order of magnitude of LLM vs. human training data, plotted by human age. Ranges are approximated from Frank (2023a). (right) A schematic depiction of evaluation scaling curves for human learners vs. models plotted by training data quantity.

Paper abstract

AI models are fascinating, impressive, and sometimes problematic. But what can they tell us about the human mind?

In a new review paper, @noahdgoodman.bsky.social and I discuss how modern AI can be used for cognitive modeling: osf.io/preprints/ps...

❗RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES❗

We're hiring for an ambitious @wellcometrust.bsky.social project exploring brain mechanisms of planning/inference in psychosis 🧠

Tackled at multiple scales: from single neurons to human behaviour/fMRI and neural networks.

Opportunities for 1 post-doc 1 clinical fellow 👀

🚨 Finally out! My new @annualreviews.bsky.social in Psychology paper:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
We unpack why psych theories of generalization keep cycling from rigid rule-based models to flexible similarity-based ones, then culminating in Bayesian hybrids. Let's break it down 👉 🧵

📣 Absolutely elated to announce that in 2026, I’ll be joining Rutgers-Newark as TT Assistant Professor in the Dept of Psychology! Can’t wait to join this incredible community! 🤩 I’ve got some fun projects ahead as I wrap up my postdoc, but soon I’ll start recruiting at all levels so stay tuned. 1/3

GitHub - marcelbinz/Psych-201 Contribute to marcelbinz/Psych-201 development by creating an account on GitHub.

We are currently building the largest, cross-domain data set of human behavior as part of an open collaborative project. Contributions of any form are welcome, but especially experiments with meta-data from developmental, cross-cultural, or clinical studies.

More details: github.com/marcelbinz/P...

The new AI Lab at Princeton has positions for AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows for three research initiatives: AI for Accelerating Invention, Natural and Artificial Minds, and Princeton Language and Intelligence. Deadline is 12/31. More information here: ai.princeton.edu/ai-lab/emplo...

Wayfinding across ocean and tundra: what traditional cultures teach us about navigation Research on human navigation by psychologists and neuroscientists has come mainly from a limited range of environments and participants inhabiting western countries. By contrast, numerous anthropological accounts illustrate the diverse ways in which cultures adapt to their surrounding environment to navigate. Here, we provide an overview of these studies and relate them to cognitive science research. The diversity of cues in traditional navigation is much higher and multimodal compared with navigation experiments in the laboratory. It typically involves an integrated system of methods, drawing on a detailed understanding of the environmental cues, specific tools, and forms part of a broader cultural system. We highlight recent methodological developments for measuring navigation skill and modelling behaviour that will aid future research into how culture and environment shape human navigation.

Spent part of my weekend going down a rabbit hole reading about Polynesian navigation, and came across this nice little article from @hugospiers.bsky.social reviewing diverse approaches to navigation by indigenous cultures around the world. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Hello!!👋 I'm Sally Xie. Excited to share that in a few weeks, I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor @SFU Psych! 🏞️ @sfufass.bsky.social

I'm recruiting a lab manager & my first grad student. If you're interested in social cognition/perception & transformative experiences, check out socosci.com🦉!

Alignment is more than comparing similarity judgments! How well do pretrained neural networks align with humans in few-shot learning settings? Come check our poster #3904 at #NeurIPS on Wednesday to find out

Reinforcement Learning: An Overview This manuscript gives a big-picture, up-to-date overview of the field of (deep) reinforcement learning and sequential decision making, covering value-based RL, policy-gradient methods, model-based met...

An updated intro to reinforcement learning by Kevin Murphy: arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265! Like their books, it covers a lot and is quite up to date with modern approaches. It also is pretty unique in coverage, I don't think a lot of this is synthesized anywhere else yet

A tale of two algorithms: Structured slots explain prefrontal sequence memory and are unified with hippocampal cognitive maps The algorithm of the prefrontal working memory system on sequence memory tasks is not well understood, whereas it is well understood for the hippocampal episodic memory system. This work shows a mathematical duality between working and episodic sequence memory. This leads to a computational understanding of sequence working memory—as structured activity slots. This theory algorithmically explains recurrent neural network (RNN) and prefrontal representations during sequence memory tasks.

Stellar new work lead by the inimitable James Whittington in Neuron that develops a new theory unifying episodic and working memory and explains diverse hippocampal and prefrontal data: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... w/Will Dorrell, @behrenstimb.bsky.social Mohamedy El Gaby

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉

tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...