Mirko Thalmann

Our model jointly learns object embeddings and idiosyncratic weightings of psychological dimensions.

The results show improved accuracy on hold-out data as well as reliably measurable dimensional weights (up to ~8 dimensions) and summary stats thereof

Do people's internal representations of natural objects differ? We (@ericschulz.bsky.social) show so by incorporating idiosyncrasies into neural nets to create better models of human behavior. We also reliably extract idiosyncrasies and map them to demographics. More: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pxt9a

Model-based exploration is measurable across tasks but not linked to personality and psychiatric assessments Scientific Reports - Model-based exploration is measurable across tasks but not linked to personality and psychiatric assessments

Publication alert! Our latest paper with @kristinwitte.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social is out in Scientific Reports: rdcu.be/eydDQ! We explore whether model-based exploration strategies can be used to capture individual differences. Curious how cognitive models meet personality science?

📣 Very excited for our symposium on “Building Knowledge Structures” tomorrow at 16:30 at @pug2025.bsky.social

Together with amazing people:
@barnaveliirina.bsky.social
@lukaskunz.bsky.social @mirkothm.bsky.social
and Andrea Greve

Our review with @ericschulz.bsky.social about generalization in humans and machines is out now in Current Directions in Psychological Science: doi.org/10.1177/0963...
Check it out!

🚨 We're hiring! If you're excited about 🤖 ML/LLMs, 🧠 cognitive science, or 💭 computational psychiatry, come join us in Munich. Two fully funded PhDs @www.helmholtz-munich.de: tailored mentorship, international vibe, lots of room to grow.
📅 May 16th
🔗 hcai-munich.com/PhDHCAI.pdf

Defragmenting psychology Nature Human Behaviour - Psychology is fragmented into the study of a myriad of constructs and measures, most of which are used very rarely. This hinders cumulative knowledge generation. We call on...

New comment by @faridanvari.bsky.social and friends arguing that psychology is fragmented into the study of too many constructs and measures with too few links.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Every experience is unique 🌟 light shifts, angles change, yet we recognize objects effortlessly. How do our minds do this? And (how) do they differ from machines? In our new preprint with @ericschulz.bsky.social, we review human generalization and compare it to machine generalization: osf.io/k6ect

Towards Automation of Cognitive Modeling 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....

About a month late posting this, but here's a new project with @ericschulz.bsky.social, @akjagadish.bsky.social, @marvinmathony.bsky.social and Tobias Ludwig

We are using LLMs to propose cognitive models in learning and decision making data. Presenting this work at RLDM!

arxiv.org/abs/2502.00879

Observed power, and what to do if your editor asks for post-hoc power analyses This blog post is now included in the paper "Sample size justification" available at PsyArXiv. Observed power (or post-hoc power) is th...

Sigh

another day, another colleague falls foul of post-hoc power calculation requests by a grant reviewer

@lakens.bsky.social 's blog page comes in handy for this nonsense

#episky

daniellakens.blogspot.com/2014/12/obse...

Did you ever wonder how much you can trust your Bayes Factor estimates? Klaus Oberauer, @frederikaust.com and I did and investigated variance, bias, and computational costs for estimating Bayes Factors via bridgesampling and the Savage-Dickey density ratio.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Ever wondered why only some memories 🧠 come easily? Our latest work (osf.io/preprints/ps...) led by S. Haridi, with @ericschulz.bsky.social, shows that targeted memory retrieval speeds up with precise semantic and temporal retrieval cues. Hence, crafting cues can give you instant access to memories⚡

An Inception-Cohort Study Quantifying How Many Registered Studies Are Publicly Shared - Eline N. F. Ensinck, Daniël Lakens, 2025 We quantified how many studies registered on the OSF up to November 2017 are performed but not shared after at least 4 years. Examining a sample of 169 register...

We love to share new papers on here. But how many of the studies that scientists preregister on the Open Science Framework are never shared publicly? In a new paper in AMPPS we estimate 40% of preregistered studies are never shared. That’s a lot. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🧵⤵️

The Collapse of Ego Depletion Science's Biggest Self-Control Failure

Roy Baumeister called ego depletion "one of the most replicable findings in social psychology." As someone who spent 20 years studying it—and ultimately had to admit it wasn't real—I have to respectfully disagree. Here's my perspective of what went so wrong.

GitHub - marcelbinz/Psych-201 Contribute to marcelbinz/Psych-201 development by creating an account on GitHub.

We are currently building the largest, cross-domain data set of human behavior as part of an open collaborative project. Contributions of any form are welcome, but especially experiments with meta-data from developmental, cross-cultural, or clinical studies.

More details: github.com/marcelbinz/P...

Building, Reusing, and Generalizing Abstract Representations from Concrete Sequences Humans excel at learning abstract patterns across different sequences, filtering out irrelevant details, and transferring these generalized concepts to new sequences. In contrast, many sequence learni...

In the second paper, Shuchen Wu develops and tests a hierarchical model of chunking and abstraction that is inspired by how humans make sense of sequences. This is joint work with @mirkothm.bsky.social, Peter Dayan, and @zeynepakata.bsky.social.
arxiv.org/abs/2410.21332

In our latest paper, published in @commspsychol.bsky.social, we show that two types of motifs, projectional and variable, are used by people to enhance memorization of abstract sequences. This work was led by Shuchen Wu and @mirkothm.bsky.social

Preprint alert! We explore 3 exploration tasks, testing if they measure a stable construct & its link to real-world exploration. We find improved robustness of latent factors compared to single-task estimates.
With Mirko Thalmann & @ericschulz.bsky.social
🔗https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tzuey