Anna Thoma

Come work with us! And get in touch with any questions you might have about the position, our labs or living/working in Germany #PostdocWanted

**Postdoc position in human category learning**

@thecharleywu.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and I are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a joint project on human category learning at the Centre for Cognitive Science @tuda.bsky.social.

www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉

We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

📣 New preprint and database synthesizing 3.8 million decisions from experience 📣

The project offers researchers a unique opportunity to explore how design features shape human learning and decision making.

Check out the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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?

Postdoctoral Position in Social Science Genomics | Max Planck Research Group Biosocial

We have an open postdoc position in Social Science Genomics in Berlin!

Includes gene-environment interplay within German population cohorts & experimental online survey studies to probe public perceptions of potential DNA biomarker applications

🔗 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/2196134/2025...

🚨 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...

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

You can explore the map online here, check it out: mpib.berlin/vFVqU

With @bolenz.bsky.social, @kevinetiede.bsky.social, Yujia Yang, @stepalminteri.bsky.social, Ralph Hertwig, and @dirkwulff.bsky.social

🚨 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

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Analyzing the academic trajectories of 78,216 psychology researchers, we demonstrate a persistent gender attrition gap, with women psychologists dropping out of academia at consistently higher rates than men psychologists.

Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13273

Postdoc position open in Zurich -- Prof. Martin Tomasik and I have a joint SNF project on interpretable neural network approaches for large scale, complex item / temporal structure, online learning / cognitive development data.

Please retweet.

tinyurl.com/PostdocGNNSNF

🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀
I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales
👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

Nudging has shaped behavioral policy for years—but what are its downsides? In our latest episode, 𝐑𝐚𝐥𝐩𝐡 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐰𝐢𝐠 makes the case for shifting from nudging to 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠—an alternative behavioral science approach that fosters people’s agency, self-control, and decision-making skills. tinyurl.com/3yvfwxc8

🙌 Hot off the presses @natcomms.nature.com! We created a custom #Minecraft environment to study a long-standing puzzle in cognitive science:
How do humans flexibly adapt their individual and social learning strategies in dynamic, realistic situations? Check it out 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

8/n Freely accessible, pre-formatted version of the manuscript: mpib.berlin/zWaGS
Thank you to my PhD advisor Christin Schulze & co-author Ben Newell for their support in this project. Happy to see it out now 💐!

7/n We argue to more strongly consider the structure of real-world learning environments (where rewards may not be random but rather clumped or autocorrelated) when examining the development of learning and decision-making strategies.

6/n Our work connects to research on the benefits of cognitive immaturity: For instance, perseveration tendencies in early childhood may hold advantages when repetition fosters learning. Similarly, exploring a lot (maybe too much) helps older kids to adapt to changing environments.

5/n Computational modeling results reinforce behavioral analyses: Children's exploratory behavior and adaptivity increase with age, but adults seem better able to balance exploration and exploitation.

4/n By age 6, children increasingly diversify choices, for instance, through probability matching. They explore widely (sometimes more than adults) and are quickly able to adapt to an ecologically plausible statistical task structure.

3/n 3–4-year-olds showed strong perseveration tendencies: They often stick with one option, even if switching would be beneficial. Our findings integrate into previous research showing increased maximization in young kids; however, we suggest that low implementation effort is key.

2/n Children (3–11 years, N = 362) & adults (N = 121) repeatedly chose between two options with different reward probabilities. We tested three between-subjects conditions: two static (50% vs. 50% and 70 vs. 30%) and one ecologically plausible environment (initially 70% vs. 30%).

1/n 🆕📄: How do children learn to adapt to different environments when making repeated choices? And what do cognitive immaturity and probability matching have to do with it? Our new article explores how kids & adults differ in probability learning across statistical task structures: mpib.berlin/R3RFy

🚀COSMOS is BACK!!!💫 The Computational School on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) will take place in RIKEN, Tokyo, between 29 Sept - 3 Oct, organised by me and fantastic @thecharleywu.bsky.social ! Application deadline: 25th April. For more details see 👉️ cosmossummerschool.github.io

Summer Institute

🚨 Applications for the 22nd Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality are now open!

🌐 Join us in Berlin @mpib-berlin.bsky.social from June 17–25, 2025 to explore "Decision Making in a Digital World".

✏️ Application deadline is March 9 - more info at 👇!!

www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/research/res...

YouTube video by Unraveling Behavior Shahar Hechtlinger: The Psychology of Life's Most Important Decisions

🎙️ New Episode!

ARC's Shahar Hechtlinger talks about transformative life decisions—becoming a parent, changing careers, or moving abroad. This episode gives you simple strategies and real-life examples to navigate the decisions.

#Podcast #UnravBehavior

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKEK...

Junior Professorship (W1, non tenured) in Computational Social Science Deadline: 7th of January 2025

Job announcement: Junior Professorship in Computational Social Science at the University of Konstanz.
Join us at the Center for Data and Methods! Feel free to reach out if you have questions.
stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2...

In sum, our findings integrate into literature showing that probabilistic inferences in childhood may be highly context-dependent, that previous findings may not easily generalize to a new task, and that the learning format is an important aspect to consider in future work.11/n

Open questions: Does thinking about causal relationships affect repeated risky choices in childhood? And what is the role of first-hand observing the randomization process (i.e., a shuffling animation mixing the colored items during our task)?10/n