Nathaniel Daw

Children leverage predictive representations for flexible, value-guided choice By harnessing a mental model of how the world works, learners can make flexible choices in changing environments. However, while children and adolesce…

New paper out in cognition with @arikahn.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, Cate Hartley, and @katenuss.bsky.social !!

We show that children 👶 use predictive representations (e.g. SR) to guide their choices, providing an account of how they can make flexible choices in a changing world

This is also why Sacks' writing is so extraordinary.

They didn't need the scientific literature, nor faculty input, to do the right thing all along. They have always had more access to private data, which must tell the same story as the public data even more clearly. It's distressing to admit but the only thing that has changed is the political winds.

I don't think anyone realized anything. They had to know all along if you and I did: just different factors weighed differently at different times.

It's embarrassing and outrageous it took us five years to bring them back.

This is the best news for Princeton since John Nash's thesis. admission.princeton.edu/apply/standa...

... the dark hole in my soul...

I think the Nazi submarine at science and industry museum is extraordinary, as is pequod's pizza.

(I'm actually just trying to bait @nicolecrust.bsky.social into scolding you for my reactionary tweets again.)

Do you think Lord Krebs would have let trainees speak let alone squeal with delight?

Excited to read this paper but you should really clamp down on this undecorous emotion in your lab meeting.

New paper in CPsy 📢 - from Mostafa Abdou, @raziasahi.bsky.social, Thomas Hull, @eriknook.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social - cpsyjournal.org/articles/10....

I am not sure how far this goes back in Earl's thinking. For my own part I legit expected Earl's early experiments to find grandmother cells for task set variables in pfc (maybe based on my own shallow reading of eg miller & cohen) and was surprised when he found mixed codes instead.

To be fair, Earl was probably fifteen years ahead of this becoming a commonplace idea in deep networks (which arguably happened only quite recently with the ideas about superposition in LLMs)

Come work with us! @princetonneuro.bsky.social and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience, to be hired jointly in Psychology and Neuroscience: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

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

Physicists

Not exactly related but not exactly unrelated either: xkcd.com/793

Have you considered that maybe your problem is that you are talking to physicists?

We @smfleming.bsky.social, Marion Rouault and @seowxft.bsky.social and I) have posted a reply osf.io/preprints/ps... to a preprint that recently raised concerns about the validity of associations between mental health and metacognition from online studies. I hope you can take the time to read it.

grumpy-old-men-muppet-show.gif that I don't know how to send.

I don't think we disagree. 🤷‍♂️

Also I constantly remind my coauthors that it is easily verified that ~nobody expands the thread so the first tweet & link are the whole game. Write a good tweet, leading to a good abstract leading to a good paper. Spare me the emojis.

I like organizing project history in a deep nested tree of folders labeled "new," "old," "newer," and "older"

heads up on a cool postdoc at cambridge. i collaborate on this project as well and looking forward to interacting with the team.

i know of one other almost identical case.

Right I should have said most of those recs ultimately came from Nina. I second the civil rights museum too.

Go to bomb biscuit and fishmonger; also walk on the beltline. Oh and I haven't been but people say delbar is great persian

It is indeed truly a fearful thing to agree with me

glorious comrades