Praveen Suthaharan

New from star grad student @m-meyer.bsky.social we wanted to study why delusions (and other beliefs) are so fixed. We turned to a generalization paradigm and the peak shift effect. Martin finds people with delusions over generalize causal relationships during learning: osf.io/preprints/ps...

This looks soo good Phil, I have to try

“Knowing what I don’t know” – belief in conspiracy theories relates to lower metacognitive sensitivity: a signal detection theoretic approach Beliefs in conspiracy theories are seemingly hard to dispute through facts. Researchers have partly attributed this resistance to certain information processing styles that are associated with cons...

Why are some people more prone to believe in conspiracy theories? Part of the answer may lie in metacognition, i.e., the ability to correctly estimate one's own knowledge about topics.
-> New paper with @kwinter.bsky.social, @kaisassenberg.bsky.social & Helen Fischer
🔗 doi.org/10.1080/2044...

Transdiagnostic connectome-based predictive modeling of many behavioral phenotypes reveals brain network mediators of clinical-cognitive relationships Connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) applied to functional MRI connectivity data can identify brain networks that vary with behavioral measures across subjects. The prediction strength also prov...

New preprint alert!

We used connectome-based predictive modeling in a transdiagnostic sample to identify brain network correlates of wide array of behavioral measures. We also identify where networks supporting cognition overlap with those linked to diagnostically related clinical symptomatology.

Perhaps we need tasks other than beads to assess belief formation and updating?

Pseudo-specificity, pseudo-modules, and pseudo-models in paranoia

Our reply to recent critiques of our general theory of paranoia: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We were aiming the pseudo epithet at ourselves, social phenomena needn’t have dedicated social mechanisms, and associative explanations don’t want for complexity.

Psychedelic studies in nonhuman primates: Past and future Molecular Psychiatry - Psychedelic studies in nonhuman primates: Past and future

Excited to share this super comprehensive review of psychedelic research in NHPs! W/ Alex Kwan. This work was by our grad student Jamie who is passionate about psychedelics. Her in-depth knowledge is impressive as reflected here.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New from our music team, song making in a group changes paranoia and patterns of language use consistent with lower distress, greater agency, and more positive emotion in people with psychosis: osf.io/preprints/ps...

These are the open-label pilot data - full randomized control study wrapping soon!

Your Brain Has a Reality Check System—Here’s How It Works Seeing and imagining use similar brain machinery. New research reveals the brain circuit that identifies what is real, which may help scientists understand conditions such as schizophrenia

Fun write up of Imagination/perception work from @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social and others: www.scientificamerican.com/article/newf...
I was just live on Canadian Breakfast radio chatting about it. Bad pun, but this work really has captured the public imagination!

New preprint from the lab! 🧠
Led by Juliana Trach, w/ Sophia Ou

Using fMRI, we discovered evidence for time-sensitive reward prediction errors (RPEs) in the human cerebellum.

Builds on, and extends, recent work in both rodents and NHPs

New from our CNTRACS collab: Santiago Castiello finds that people with schizophrenia false alarm speech in sine wave stimuli, and benefit more greatly from the templates - particularly if they are voice hearers osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our new paper explores an analogy between representations of objects and representations of events, finding that similar illusions arise for both! Check it out 👇

@kurtfraser.bsky.social and I made the cover of American Journal of Psychiatry - with our examination of the aberrant salience hypothesis. Next stop Rolling Stone 😎

man I wish Carlsberg had funded our FUS infrastructure grant. such a promising technology!

Diverse and flexible strategies enable successful cooperation in marmoset dyads Meisner and Shi et al. show that common marmosets flexibly coordinate with partners using both gaze-dependent and rhythmic strategies. Cooperation depends on active social monitoring and is shaped by ...

Super excited to share this new collaborative work - marmosets use diverse and highly flexible strategies when they cooperate. These strategies are powerfully determined by both social factors (sex, dominance, familiarity) & individual partner identity.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

First day back to school. Different emotions #ekman

New in TiCS w @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social

It’s been ~10yrs since misinfo research exploded but our paradigms are stuck in the post-2016 “fake news” model

Time for new approaches:
o True/False → Content that misleads
o Belief → Behavior
o Eval interventions in ambiguous settings

Brain rhythms in cognition -- controversies and future directions Brain rhythms seem central to understanding the neurophysiological basis of human cognition. Yet, despite significant advances, key questions remain unresolved. In this comprehensive position paper, w...

Brain rhythms in cognition -- controversies and future directions

arxiv.org/abs/2507.15639

Social aloofness is associated with non-social explore-exploit decisions - Communications Psychology High social aloofness was linked to reduced exploration, lower decision noise, and high choice stickiness in a bandit task. These effects reflect habitual and outcome-driven behaviours, linking social...

High social aloofness was linked to reduced exploration, lower
decision noise, and high choice stickiness in a bandit task. These effects reflect habitual and outcome-driven behaviours, linking social disengagement to nonsocial decision flexibility.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Scientist Use A.I. To Mimic the Mind, Warts and All To better understand human cognition, scientists trained a large language model on 10 million psychology experiment questions. It now answers questions much like we do.

What happens when you train AI on psychological experiments? It behaves a lot like a human mind. Here's my story on Centaur, and the debate about what AI has to offer to cognitive science. Gift link nyti.ms/3ZYqXcg 🧪

Excited to see our Centaur project out in @nature.com.
TL;DR: Centaur is a computational model that predicts and simulates human behavior for any experiment described in natural language.

Pseudosocial cognition and paranoia It has been argued that social processes are relevant to belief formation and maintenance and thence to persecutory delusions – the fixed false beliefs that others intend harm. We call this the social...

Also in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social this month, a perspective by @philcorlett.bsky.social and a new computational model of paranoia and persecutory delusions @philcorlett.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Prior Expectations of Volatility Following Psychotherapy for Delusions his randomized clinical trial examines the association between volatility expectation and psychotic symptom severity among adults with schizophrenia spectrum or delusional disorder receiving treatment...

When we started this work in the pandemic, I never imagined we’d progress to a clinical trial. Amazing work from @juliasheffield.bsky.social

Priors on volatility change with symptom improvement in a clinical trial!

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Pseudosocial cognition and paranoia It has been argued that social processes are relevant to belief formation and maintenance and thence to persecutory delusions – the fixed false beliefs that others intend harm. We call this the social turn in delusions research. It suggests that paranoia is the purview of a specialized mechanism for coalitional cognition – thinking about group membership and reputation management. Here, we suggest instead that a simpler, pseudosocial learning mechanism may underwrite persecutory and other delusions. We make our case in terms of computations (prediction, not coalition), algorithm (association rather than recursion), and implementation (dopaminergic domain-general rather than social-specific regions). We conclude with suggestions for adversarial collaboration that will clarify the contributions of domain-general versus social-specific processes to delusions.

Online Now: Pseudosocial cognition and paranoia

This just came out online - the prediction error story about delusions evolves and butts up against other accounts.
This came out too late for us to cite, but its entirely consistemt with our view of the mind and brain: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

Pseudosocial cognition and paranoia It has been argued that social processes are relevant to belief formation and maintenance and thence to persecutory delusions – the fixed false belief…

New from us: Pseudosocial Cognition and Paranoia: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
How can delusions have social contents without appealimng to dedicated social mechanisms?
Link is open for a month - please download and see what you think!

Latest from the lab: our theory of how paranoia can be about social things, without dedicated social processing @juliasheffield.bsky.social, Santiago Castiello, Rosa Rossi-Goldthorpe, @praveensuthaharan.bsky.social and @celiaheyes.bsky.social

nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Automated scientific minimization of regret We introduce automated scientific minimization of regret (ASMR) -- a framework for automated computational cognitive science. Building on the principles of scientific regret minimization, ASMR leverag...

New short-form preprint in which we use Centaur to identify gaps in interpretable cognitive models and revise them accordingly using Qwen3 -- fully automated and without a human-in-the-loop.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.17661

Generating Computational Cognitive Models using Large Language Models Computational cognitive models, which formalize theories of cognition, enable researchers to quantify cognitive processes and arbitrate between competing theories by fitting models to behavioral data....

Preprint update, co-led with @akjagadish.bsky.social, with @marvinmathony.bsky.social, Tobias Ludwig and @ericschulz.bsky.social!

New favorite typo:
Metacognition ---> meatcognition 🥩 🍖 🍗 🥓

Clive Barker inspired cognitive neuroscience incoming

I suppose in the end, its all meat