Center for Adaptive Rationality (MPIB, Berlin)

Für eine deutsche Zusammenfassung, hier ein kurzes Interview beim DLF www.deutschlandfunk.de/online-disku...

It's out!!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

Christmas came early this year! Very happy to see our paper out in Science Advances. Led by @lfoswaldo.bsky.social, we ran a unique collective field-experiment on Reddit, to better understand who is participating in online debates and why.

Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

And more below 👇

Inequalities in online discourse

Whose voices are heard in online discussions? Most people stay silent... and the drama may drive power users to post even more. A Reddit field experiment by
@lfoswaldo.bsky.social @small-schulz.bsky.social
& @lorenzspreen.bsky.social reveals why and explores ways to change it. tinyurl.com/3pwksmpu

🔬 How has psychology contributed to achieving the 🇺🇳 SDGs?

Our new preprint maps 230,000 psychology articles to the SDGs using our text2sdg R package (www.text2sdg.io) and analyzes historical trends in topics, national and gendered contributions, and citation patterns.

🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2512.08628

CEN Colloquium, Mat White: From “sure, nature is good” to “okay we need to take this seriously”

🚨 CEN Colloquium 🚨

The idea that spending time in natural settings can promote health and well-being is not new, so why is it so hard to implement?
Today we are lucky to host health and environmental psychologist Mat White @univie.ac.at. Join us!

📅 9 DEC 15:00
📍MPIB & online

shorturl.at/VwDe4

New paper involving LIP members @brandmaier.bsky.social & Ulman Lindenberger, LIP alumna Sandra Düzel, as well as colleague Simone Kühn @cen-mpib.bsky.social! 📣

CEN Colloquium: Ivan Kroupin, From village to metropolis: Predictable and pervasive changes to visual and cognitive environments as a function of general evolutionary pressures

🚨 CEN Colloquium 🚨

We are pleased to host Dr Ivan Kroupin @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social for his talk 'From village to metropolis: Predictable and pervasive changes to visual and cognitive environments as a function of general evolutionary pressures'

📅 2 DEC 15:00
📍MPIB & online

shorturl.at/JfJgM

Ihr Gehirn ist erst mit 32 erwachsen?: Was Ihnen bisher keiner über die virale Studie gesagt hat Eine neue Studie behauptet, unser Gehirn sei bis in die frühen Dreißiger nicht erwachsen, sondern jugendlich. Ganz so einfach ist es aber nicht. Zeit, das zu überprüfen.

🧠Eine Studie behauptet, das Gehirn sei erst mit 32 vollständig ausgereift. 𝐔𝐥𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐫 @lipmpib.bsky.social warnt im Tagesspiegel jedoch vor solchen vereinfachenden Aussagen.

www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/ihr-g...

Studentische Forschungsassistenz (m/w/d) | Forschungsbereich Adaptive Rationalität

📢Student research assistant wanted! (Bachelor/Master student enrolled in a German university)

We are hiring a student research assistant to help organize our 2026 Summer Institute on LLM and decision-making @mpib-berlin.bsky.social.

For details, check it out👇
www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/2234526/2025...

Expertise‐Dependent Brain Network Organization During Music Perception Brain state dynamics adjust to the processing demands of different musical pieces, with higher expertise linked to higher network integration and flexibility in functional organization, enabling more...

New article by LIP colleague Eleftheria Papadaki at al. (including @brandmaier.bsky.social and others) out now! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Information and energetic efficiency of collectives moving in dynamic media

🚨Next week's talk at ARC

We cordially invite you to join the talk by Dr. Hannah Williams (Universität Konstanz and Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior).

📅 4 December 11:00 (Local Time Germany) @mpib-berlin.bsky.social or online

See the link for details👇
www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/43971...

🧠From Perception to Appraisal: Hierarchical Brain Responses to Natural and Built Features in Urban Environments🧠

New pre-print from Carolina Zaehme & @izzysander.bsky.social, with
@aleksandrskoselevs.bsky.social, Simone Kühn and @mobilebrainimaging.bsky.social

Worth reading the whole thread! ⬇️

🥳!!NEW PREPRINT!!🥳

We show that the tendency to compress complex social information into priors about social structures becomes more pronounced during adolescence.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am soooooo excited to share this work, together with @mkwittmann.bsky.social and @yongling.bsky.social.

CEN Colloquium: Lindsay McCunn, The rise and future of environmental neuroscience in environmental psychology

The rise and future of environmental neuroscience in environmental psychology

🌎 Online
📅 18.11. 3pm CET

Lindsay McCunn @viuniversity.bsky.social
Both disciplines seek to understand the human condition. How can the connection be strengthened?

➡️ Join us online! shorturl.at/AbkjX

#Neuroskyence

🚨 Inviting collaborators! 🚨

We’re launching PsychLing-101 — an open, community-driven initiative to gather psycholinguistic datasets for cross-dataset analyses and the development of psycholinguistic foundation models.

👉 To contribute or propose a dataset, go to:
🔗 github.com/Data-X01/Psy...

Interactive room design as a tool for understanding form and style preferences - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Interactive room design as a tool for understanding form and style preferences

🚨New paper🚨

What makes a room visually appealing? Kira Pohlmann @mpib-berlin.bsky.social led a study asking people to decorate a virtual living room. Most chose angular furniture over curved, challenging the idea that people naturally prefer softer and rounder shapes

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

🚨 New preprint - Advancing Cognitive Science with LLMs

Excited to share this new preprint together with Rui Mata. We review how 🤖 LLMs can help address long-standing problems in cognitive science, highlighting opportunities and pitfalls.

🔗 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.00206

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...

What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

Direktorin Simone Kühne @mpib-berlin.bsky.social ist auch am 13.11. dabei, und wird ein Impulsvortrag um 11.15 Uhr zum Thema 'Ins Grüne? Wie Natur-Erleben Gehirn und Verhalten beeinflussen' halten.

⌚Anmelden für das virtuelle Symposium hier: www.leopoldina.org/veranstaltun...

Congratulations to Iyad Rahwan (@iyadrahwan.bsky.social), recipient of the Lagrange Prize – CRT Foundation Edition 2025, recognizing groundbreaking research in complex systems and data science! 🌍🤖

More info @isi.it:

www.isi.it/press-releas...

🚨 The Power of Wellbeing
🚨 Epigenetic Studies in Twins

We are thrilled to be co-hosting epigenetics researchers Dr Jenny van Dongen and Dr Meike Bartels at the
@mpib-berlin.bsky.social next week. Join us live or online on 4.11. for their fascinating talks.

➡️ shorturl.at/z3v2s
➡️ shorturl.at/p9dW1

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Are reinforcement learning models complete accounts of decisions from experience if they ignore explicit memory?

In this new preprint, we show that people indeed form robust explicit memory representations that flexibly guide later decisions.

🔗 Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

How to Apply

The IMPRS LIFE is looking to fill up to three PhD positions.

If you’re interested in working at @arc-mpib.bsky.social with me on topics related to social and collective decision making, and aging, please reach out. Deadline Nov 30: www.imprs-life.mpg.de/11840/how-to...

🚨 New publication: How to improve conceptual clarity in psychological science?

Thrilled to see this article with @ruimata.bsky.social out. We discuss how LLMs can be leveraged to map, clarify, and generate psychological measures and constructs.

Open access article: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

We cordially invite you to join the talk “The Power of Wellbeing” by Prof. Meike Bartels

📅 4 Nov, 11 AM CET @mpib-berlin.bsky.social

www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/43420...

We cordially invite you to join the talk “Epigenetic Studies in Twins” by Dr. Jenny van Dongen

📅 4 Nov, 1 PM CET @mpib-berlin.bsky.social

www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/events/43422...

Illustrators call is out! Anyone who knows illustrators in Leipzig area! Tell them! All the info on this website: lauramayer.space/Science-Stre...

🚨 New preprint and online tool 🚨

Thrilled to share new work, mapping the 🗺️ landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning using an 🤖 LLM-powered bibliometric approach.

We built an online tool so you can explore the landscape yourself.

Online tool: mpib.berlin/vFVqU
Preprint: osf.io/6c2va_v1

🚨 New preprint: What does the research landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning look like 🌍?

We developed an LLM-powered bibliometric analysis to characterize article clusters, investigate their connections, and examine the distribution of topics across the landscape.

osf.io/6c2va_v1