Kate Nussenbaum

Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨!

I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com

Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!

Careers at Drexel - Human Resources

The MAC lab at Drexel is looking for a new post-doc to work on NIH-funded projects investigating the intersection of prior knowledge and long-term memory consolidation. Please pass along to any interested lab members! careers.drexel.edu/cw/en-us/job...

Huge congrats to Dr. Lucinda Sisk on receiving the Flux Dissertation Award! 🎉 @fluxsociety.bsky.social #Flux2025

My lab at UCLA is hiring 1-2 PhD students this cycle!

Join us to work at the intersection of cognitive science and AI applied to pressing societal challenges like climate change.

More info about me: rachit-dubey.github.io

My lab: ucla-cocopol.github.io

Please help repost/spread the word!

Information for prospective graduate students The Translational Lab will be reviewing applications this cycle! Prospective students can apply through Clinical Science or Cognitive and Computational Sciences in the Emory Psychology Department to ...

I'll be reviewing computational/cognitive and clinical psychology applications this year for the Translational Lab at Emory 💭🔬

Please share broadly and send applicants my way! 🔄

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Very happy to see this work with Euan Prentis posted! If you’re going to CCN next week, go check out Euan’s poster on this work!

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

🌵🏜️🌵 New preprint! How do people learn from ambiguous feedback, like whether someone is laughing *with* you 😆 or *at* you 😏? A very fun collab w/ the brilliant @rbhui.bsky.social A brief thread...👇

📖 osf.io/preprints/ps...

JOB ALERT: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoc position in Osaka, Japan! Possible start in October 2025 (contact me ASAP), or from April 2026. PLEASE REPOST! #postdocjobs #neuroskyence #neuroscience #psychscisky #compneurosky #neurojobs 1/

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Just 4 weeks until the abstract deadline for Curiosity, Information Seeking & Exploration - ciseconf.github.io/CISE_2025/

🗓️ 30th Sept-1st Oct
📍 Brown University
👥 Romy Frömer, @hayleydorfman.bsky.social, Ohad Dan, Matt Nassar, Tali Sharot & Jacqueline Gottlieb
👇 Speakers

Please submit & share!

I'm thrilled to announce that I will start as an Assistant Professor in Psychology & Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona in Jan 2026! My lab will investigate human planning and decision making through a combination of computational models, behavior, and fMRI (1/2)

Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it.

We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨

Thrilled to share new research on teaching!
Work supervised by
@cocoscilab.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and @markkho.bsky.social.

This project asks:
When do people teach by mentalizing vs with heuristics? 1/3

osf.io/preprints/os...

New paper with @catehartley.bsky.social

How does the reward structure of the environment influence the specificity with which children, adolescents, and adults learn and remember information?

See preprint 🧵 and paper for our efforts to answer to this!

#PsychSciSky

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

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision making via access to detailed events Our experiences contain countless details that may be important in the future, yet we rarely know which will matter and which won't. This uncertainty poses a difficult challenge for adaptive decision ...

Why do we remember so many details of our experiences even when it is unclear if we will actually ever need them?

In a new preprint, @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I asked whether this property is adaptive, because what will be relevant in the future often (usually?!) isn’t apparent.

Current Directions in Psychological Science article entitled More Than Just a Phase: Adolescence as a Window Into How the Brain Generates Behavior

Excited to share this brief review where @katieinsel.bsky.social & I discuss studying adolescence to understand how brains work! We highlight avenues for future collaborative work at the intersection of cognitive, computational, & developmental neuroscience 🧠
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Our findings suggest that differences in the dynamics of learning can account for age-related changes in structured knowledge acquisition.

Lots more details (and exciting open questions) in the paper!

The extent to which participants used this more complex form of predictive learning related to — and accounted for age-related improvements in — their explicit knowledge of the task’s underlying structure.

With increasing age, however, participants engaged a more complex form of state-conditional predictive learning, in which they incrementally constructed an abstracted world model of the temporal relations between states — or, a ‘successor representation’.

Trial-by-trial learning of successor representations in human behavior Decisions in humans and other organisms depend, in part, on learning and using models that capture the statistical structure of the world, including the long-run expected outcomes of our actions. One ...

By leveraging a recently developed computational model (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...), we found that younger participants primarily engaged in recency-based prediction, such that their expectations for upcoming events are shaped by those they experienced in the recent past.

Here, we show that these developmental differences in explicit knowledge may arise because the predictive learning mechanisms that people engage to make sense of streams of continuous input change from childhood to adulthood.

While people are excellent statistical learners from early in life, in complex environments, adults sometimes demonstrate greater explicit knowledge of structured relations between states.

New preprint 📝 - another fun collaboration with @arikahn.bsky.social, @licezhang.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social

We ask: Why do children and adults often derive different representations of their environments from the same experiences? 🧠👶🔎

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨New pre-print out from our lab!!🚨 "Developmental differences in exploration reveal underlying differences in structure inference" by @noraharhen.bsky.social, Rheza Budiono, @catehartley.bsky.social, and
@aaronbornstein.bsky.social. Read here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

So excited to announce Curiosity, Information Seeking & Exploration conference: 30th Sept-1st Oct @Brown University. Amazing speakers sites.google.com/view/informa... and free!

Abstract submissions open until 7th July

w/ Romy Frömer, Ohad Dan, @hayleydorfman.bsky.social, Matt Nassar. Please share!

Out today in Nature Machine Intelligence!

From childhood on, people can create novel, playful, and creative goals. Models have yet to capture this ability. We propose a new way to represent goals and report a model that can generate human-like goals in a playful setting... 1/N

Immature vocalizations elicit simplified adult speech across multiple languages Altriciality, or extended early immaturity, creates opportunities for learning. Across languages, Elmlinger et al. show that parents simplify their speech in response to children’s early vocalizations...

How do languages become learnable for young children? Our new paper in Current Biology shows how “Immature vocalizations elicit simplified adult speech across multiple languages.” 🧵 of our findings below: www.cell.com/current-biol... 1/9

hello world. we have an opening for a strong theory postdoc to work in my lab on a exciting collaboration with Josh Berke and Loren Frank labs modeling and analyzing data on rat hipp-pfc-bg-da involvement in spatial maze foraging, replay, value etc. apply here: www.princeton.edu/acad-positio...