Yang Xu (许扬)

🚨 New preprint on individual differences in artificial neural networks and human behavior.

We show that individual differences among ANN instances trained with different random initializations capture the individual differences in human behavior.

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BAMB! 2026 | Barcelona Summer School for Advanced Modeling of Behavior Intensive training for experienced researchers in cognitive science, computational neuroscience and neuro-AI. Five interconnected modules, expert faculty, hands-on projects. July 12-23, 2026.

Applications for BAMB! 2026 are officially open!

Join us in Barcelona (July 12–23) to master the art of behavioral modeling with our incredible faculty:

@meganakpeters.bsky.social
@marcelomattar.bsky.social
@khamascience.bsky.social
@thecharleywu.bsky.social

Apply now here: www.bambschool.org

📣 Applications for the 23rd Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality are now open!

✨Join us in Berlin @arc-mpib.bsky.social June 08–16, 2026, to explore the topic of “Decision Making in the Age of AI”.

✏️ More details + application form (deadline: March 16): www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/research/res...

‪Voxelwise Encoding Models (VEMs) are a great framework for modeling fMRI data, but it can be difficult to implement. We've made VEM accessible by providing software, tutorials and reviews that guide its use an implementation. Get it here:
gallantlab.org/blog/2025-12...
#neuroscience, #neuroimaging

🎓 PhD Position (Paris) – Computational Cognitive Science, AI & Mental Health

For Master’s students outside France
Project on the computational bases of narrative pleasure 🧠📚🎮

Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly? A widespread observation is that people avoid mentally effortful courses of action, and much recent work examining cognitive effort has explained subjective effort evaluation – and, consequently, pref...

New pontification piece with @awestbrook.bsky.social and Jean Daunizeau, just out in TICS:
Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly?
(or why does it hurt to think)

never written a review paper before in my life, that was a new and unusual experience

Registration for escan2026.eu is now open!!👇
See you in magnificent Rome!
#escan #conference

We are hiring 11 Doctoral Researchers (100%) in the DFG-RTG "The Experience of Stories in the Digital Age". Uni Wuerzburg, Germany. Disciplines: Communication, Psychology, Computer Science. Topics: VR / XR, storytelling robots, influencers, misinformation. More: go.uniwue.de/rtg3087jobs Please share

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio.
led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

#PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

Excited to share new work with @hleemasson.bsky.social , Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and @lisik.bsky.social! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: osf.io/b5p4n
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Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ?

Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration.

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

📢 Now accepted at Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 🤩

Our proposal offers a framework for understanding how fundamental regulatory sensations, such as boredom & effort, shape temporal experience through interoceptive mechanisms.

Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

TL;DR: Check 🧵 below

GitHub - jmumford/randomise-prep: Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. - jmumford/randomise-prep

Do you ever wish you could just use python to pull together the files and code for running FSL's randomise? Me too! I made this: github.com/jmumford/ran... It will even replace the numbers in the file outputs with contrast names of your choosing (and replace corrp with 1minusp).

Awesome new preprint from @jasonleng.bsky.social!

Deadlines in decision making often truncate too-slow responses. Failing to account for these omissions can (severely) bias your DDM parameter estimates.

They offer a great solution to correct for this issue.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Reward function compression facilitates goal-dependent reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making l...

📢 New preprint!
How do humans learn from arbitrary, abstract goals? We show that, when goal spaces can be compressed, costly working-memory processes give way to internalized reward functions, enabling efficient goal-dependent reinforcement learning. @annecollins.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.06810

Excited to share joint work with Ulf Hahnel and @sgluth.bsky.social on investigating how attribute translations - a widely implemented behavior intervention - lead to more ecological consumer choices. Main results are below, but check out our preprint 👇
www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

哈哈，看完结果就在翻过去看你有没有讨论fatigue，我的感觉是主要会影响这个。

My pre-PhD work with @noham-wolpe.bsky.social is finally out! doi.org/10.1037/mot0000411

How does progress feedback influence effort-based decision-making? Our study involved a novel effort manipulation designed for online testing and mouse-tracking. The results came with a twist on apathy… (🧵1/3)

New paper our in @pnas.org, lead by @isabellehoxha.bsky.social with Léo Sperber. We use evolutionary simulation to assess and compare the adaptive value of positivity bias and gradual perseveration in reinforcement learning. Follow the thread below (and Isabelle!) for more details!

Computational postdoc ad for KCL funded by the Wellcome Trust on the NEPTUNE project

🧠 We're hiring a computational postdoc!

3+ years with me & @mitulamehta.bsky.social on @wellcometrust.bsky.social funded social cognition/paranoia research at the IoPPN.

Lead & develop computational work, collaborate with experimentalists on psychosis/THC data.

DM for details! lnkd.in/eCMy9Jf5

🚨 Want to research the computational & neural mechanisms of planning and its disruption in mental health? If so, join our lab!

Here's one prestigious postdoc fellowship that just opened: azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...

reach out w/your CV to paul.sharp@biu.ac.il

lab: sharplabbiu.github.io

New preprint! We are pleased to share our Hierarchical Bayesian framework for Interoceptive Psychophysics! Implemented in rstan, we provide a complete suite of tools spanning model comparison, parameter recovery, multifactor designs, power analysis, and more! 🎯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So happy to see this work out! 🥳
Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰

Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩‍🔬

Between-group competitive advantage offsets foraging costs for bigger groups in harsher seasons Larger animal groups are widely understood to require more space and travel farther to mitigate the foraging costs of within-group competition. Yet, between-group interactions and shifting resource di...

New paper from my group led by Odd Jacobson, former PhD student & current postdoc @livingingroups.bsky.social : How do animal groups simultaneously balance between- and within-group competition in dynamic environments and does this impact movement and space use? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style?

In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf

TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

Preprint⭐
Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Reconciling flexibility and efficiency: medial entorhinal cortex represents a compositional cognitive map Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex.
rdcu.be/eAofi

Sounds great and ambitious! BTW, do you know if there are any application of this idea in social domain? E.g., forming impression about a person in different groups