Nathaniel Daw

life is full of haters but at least gemini thinks my plan to make my quiche vegetarian by replacing bacon with MSG + liquid smoke is "incredibly thoughtful."

Provocative title ftw. (Tho it inspired @kristorpjensen.bsky.social to give a talk titled "planning in the brain: it's not what nathaniel thinks it is")

1/ 🚨 New preprint: "Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist" Introducing AutoCog 🤖 — a fully autonomous AI system that runs the entire scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science to surface novel theories of human behavior 🧵

Co-let w/ @younesstrittmatter.bsky.social Kudos to the all-start team of @georgekafetzis.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social, @ericschulz.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, @suyoghc.bsky.social, and @cocoscilab.bsky.social

I've been a bit quiet lately (lots of teaching duties...), but I am glad to share that I will have some academic "me time" for the next few weeks. I will be at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute & Department of Psychology, for a research stay hosted by @nathanieldaw.bsky.social!

First paper since joining Google DeepMind! We present 🌍ATLAS (Active Theory Learning for Automated Science), a pipeline that generates interpretable mechanistic models from data and optimizes experiments to test them. Thread below

I have been so excited about this project. In many ways the most surprising thing to me was how seemingly similar the AI-discovered models were to simple ones I thought I understood, even though they fit way better. This means we can also really get what makes them work.

How do we predict what’s going to happen next? In a new paper, we @arikahn.bsky.social @licezhang.bsky.social @nathanieldaw.bsky.social @catehartley.bsky.social ask how kids, teens, and adults solve this problem. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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

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

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...

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

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.

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

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...

Excited to share a new paper with Daphna Shohamy & @nathanieldaw.bsky.social! Using fmri reactivation, we measured *when* people build preferences from memory. We found that people tend to do so before a choice, but that they also wait until choice time when options are linked to multiple memories

one of the most intriguing projects i've been involved in: automated scientific discovery in an area (human/animal RL) I've been working on forever. can an LLM do the job of my grad students? if it is backed up by super smart scientists incl @pcastr.bsky.social @neurokim.bsky.social & kevin miller

announcing this year's neuroeconomics summer school, this time outside paris. too many great lecturers to list, even too many great organizers (plassmann,glimcher,tymula,kable,me). & you wouldnt believe all the past students and where they are now. sign up: www.insead.edu/events/neuro...

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...

Hey 🦋 fam! Check out this great summary of our study by @psypost.bsky.social, out now in Psychological Medicine doi.org/10.1017/S003... w Deanna Barch, Johanne Solis, Temitope Oshinowo, Ivan Grahek, Anna Konova, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social & Jon Cohen. Thanks to funders @njacts.bsky.social & NJHF!

New preprint - "Children leverage predictive representations for flexible, value-guided choice." A fun collaboration with @arikahn.bsky.social @nathanieldaw.bsky.social @catehartley.bsky.social, led by @licezhang.bsky.social 🧠🧒💻

In a dynamic reinforcement learning task, human players adaptively employ a mix of decision strategies, including model-based learning but also the successor representation. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉 tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...

How do DA and 5HT drugs alter reinforcement learning? Join us next Wednesday for talks by @anahitm.bsky.social, Diego Pizzagalli, Michael Browning, Roshan Cools, Emma Robinson, Yael Niv, Cath Harmer, Isabel Berwian, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social and Anne Collins. Links etc: acplab.org/2024/11/15/r...

New in Nature Communication with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social : humans tell apart volatility from stochasticity & adapt their learning adaptively in opposite directions. Both response times and prediction data suggest outcome autocorrelation is key in this process www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human behavior is hierarchically structured. But what determines *which* hierarchies people use? In a preprint, we run an experiment where people create programs that correspond to hierarchies, finding that people prefer structures with more reuse. arxiv.org/abs/2311.18644 1/7

One more week to apply for our joint faculty position in Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Computer Science Dept, in neuroAI and intelligent systems, broadly construed. Do you fit? Yes. But feel free to contact me with q's. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Come work with us! @PrincetonNeuro and @PrincetonCS are searching for a joint faculty member in NeuroAI and intelligent systems. On the PNI side, our human cog neuro group (already v. computational) is esp keen to develop more connections with AI and CS. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

@mgallen.bsky.social Interception is narcissism. Change my mind on Twitter.

My favorite part of the consciousness pseudoscience letter discourse is the repeated sense that free energy theory is implicitly criticized or perhaps next up against the wall.

I think the right way to understand the pseudoscience letter is like a letter to the editor of NYTimes or something. It's responding to media coverage, not directly arguing science. So it does read a little weird as a psyrxiv preprint, and I think this is driving some of the backlash.

I didnt sign the letter because it's out of my lane. But I am v sympathetic. HL fills in context below which is rly about lifting the veil on what ppl rly think/pushing back on comms. Wont satisfy backlashers looking for direct science debate. For that start w Hakwan's earlier preprint on Cogitate.