Dan Mirea

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 🚨

We present the decisions-from-experience database (DfE-DB), including data from 168 studies.

The data are currently shared with the original authors and made public upon publication.

🔗 Database: github.com/dwulff/dfe-db
🔗 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Honorific Fellows celebrated by Princeton Graduate School amidst 125th Anniversary Thirty-two exceptional graduate students who received named or endowed fellowships for this academic year were recently feted by the Princeton Graduate School. The honorific fellowships support advanc...

Congrats to PNI + affiliated trainees named 2025 Honorific Fellows by the @princeton.edu Graduate School!

👏 Victor Geadah
👏 Isaac Christian
👏 @danmirea.bsky.social

gradschool.princeton.edu/news/2025/ho...

Interpretation Issues With the Patient Health Questionnaire Instructions This survey study assesses whether responses to the Patient Health Questionnaire reflect symptom frequency and severity.

1/n Out today in @jamapsychiatry.com: Interpretation Issues With the Patient Health Questionnaire Instructions. We find troubling variability in whether people think they should respond based on the frequency of the Sx or the frequency of being bothered by the Sx.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Our paper on the ☀️ "summer slide" 🛝 is out now @pnas.org!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Summer slide is a replicable phenomenon across diverse datasets that's more than "forgetting" school material in vacation months, but effects of socioeconomic inequality are ➡️ 7x bigger! ⬅️
#PsychSciSky #DevPsy
🧵👇

Excited to see this out!

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?

Super happy to see this review out! We ask why people are so reluctant to abandon goals and how this commitment could be understood computationally. Work with Jill O'Reilly & @yaelniv.bsky.social

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

Neurocomputational basis of learning when choices simultaneously affect both oneself and others Nature Communications - When learning to make choices that simultaneously affect the self and others, asymmetric encoding of information guides future social behaviors across mutually beneficial,...

📢 Thrilled to share our paper is out now in @natcomms.nature.com

Shared computations underlie how we acquire actions that are mutually beneficial, instrumentally harmful (benefits self at the expense of others), altruistic (benefit others at the expense of self), or mutually costly

🧵 rdcu.be/eL8mZ

1/ To explore or to exploit? I’m excited to share my new preprint with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in exploration-exploitation behaviours, using a gamified task! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games Scientific Reports - Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games

What influences whether people have fun with a task?

Our paper “Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations and success influence enjoyment in video games” with @thecharleywu.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social now in Scientific Reports!

rdcu.be/eI069

Paper summary below 1/4

Abstract and results summary

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵

I strongly believe modeling behavior will be critical for understanding mental health well enough to develop new interventions, but the gap between task-based and naturalistic behavior is MASSIVE. Some great ideas here for bridging that gap!

Such an important topic: computational psychiatry at the nexus of lab-based understanding (eg of reinforcement learning and mood) and measures of real-world behavior and mental health conditions.

(Scroll to the bottom for a link open to all).

📢 My lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is considering graduate student applications this fall

We welcome applicants interested in using computational modeling & fMRI to study social connection

🗓️ Deadline: December 1, 2025
🔗 Learn more: sinclaboratory.com/apply

#comppsychiatry #socialneuro

Thank you so much for sharing!!

Fantastic paper by @danmirea.bsky.social ! 👇

Inspiring work by @danmirea.bsky.social!

Cognitive modeling of real-world behavior for understanding mental health A core strength of computational psychiatry is its focus on theory-driven research, in which cognitive processes are precisely quantified using comput…

Read the full paper using this free access link here:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Some to-dos for the field:
- identify amenable types of real-world data
- integrate them into data-collection pipelines alongside lab-based tasks
- assess links to mental health
- assess lab-based versus real-world convergent validity of parameters
- expand models to accommodate real-world data

…and challenges of this approach:
⚠️ Noisy data
⚠️ Analytical complexity
⚠️ Data collection burden
⚠️ Ethical considerations

It remains to be seen whether real-world data can better computational psychiatry.

Finally, we explore opportunities:
👍 Testing the generalizability of in-lab computational psychiatry findings to every-day life
👍 Incorporating linguistic behavior into cognitive models using LLMs (see figure)

We also provide a (non-exhaustive) taxonomy of cognitive processes paired with modeling frameworks and types of real-world data that could be used to probe them:

We review recent studies that probe cognition using real-world behavior, primarily in a reinforcement learning framework.

Some of these have uncovered novel links to mental health (e.g. linking depression to blunted reactivity to positive prediction errors, or higher sensitivity to social rewards)

By real-world data we mean any data that reflect a person’s every-day behavior. We distinguish 3 types:
- experience sampling data (active, self-report)
- passive sensing data (e.g. geolocation, physiology, social proximity)
- digital-behavior data (e.g. social media, texting, phone/app navigation)

Computational psychiatry often relies on behavior in cognitive tasks, which are simpler, less engaging and often less social than real-world environments.

By contrast, real-world data have intrinsic ecological validity and allow the continuous assessment of cognition and its variation over time.

🚨Out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨

We explore the use of cognitive theories/models with real-world data for understanding mental health.

We review emerging studies and discuss challenges and opportunities of this approach.

With @yaelniv.bsky.social and @eriknook.bsky.social

Thread ⬇️

Thanks so much Angela!

Thanks for sharing Ondrej!! 🙂