Professor Dean Mobbs

🚨This preprint is now out in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... We combine a dyadic foraging paradigm w/ computational modeling + ABM to study how people navigate differing preferences, share responsibility for shared outcomes & what that means for the group! more in 🧵⬇️ @fearbrain.bsky.social

Google DeepMind researchers have transformed classic psychological theories of attitude change into executable models using generative AI, simulating historical behavior patterns. This work clarifies theoretical ambiguities and highlights context's role. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19791

New preprint w/ @fearbrain.bsky.social, Bo Zhang, @aanixel.bsky.social & @pandascholar.bsky.social where we examine online political debates to understand how interactions become hostile using data from Reddit, real-time online chat experiments & brain imaging during chats - osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

I’m excited to share our new preprint: A Multi-Level Examination of How Hostility Unfolds During Online Argumentation. osf.io/preprints/ps... This is the first paper to examine how toxicity manifests from belief differences and how they are represented in the human brain.

✨New Perspective out w/ Wenning Deng and @fearbrain.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! We argue that social foraging gives us a unifying, and ecologically grounded way to study how decisions unfold across levels — from individuals and dyads to collectives. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

New paper from our lab on the social determinants of successful dyadic foraging. Thanks to Ketika Garg and Wenning Deng for all their hard work! osf.io/preprints/ps...

"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else." - John Burroughs

new preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... aphantasics reported to feel less 'absorbed' as they read stories, but they dwelled just as much on words that typically evoke imagery. so perhaps they just didn't realize they have (non-conscious) imagery too Ali Moharramipour's 1st paper as senior author 🧠📈

Postdoc opportunity in my lab at the University of Amsterdam! Our project investigates human sources of bias in AI models of face classification & implications for users' behavior. Co-supervised by me and Prof Andreas Schuck. More details here: bit.ly/4kOS8ir Deadline is April 15. DM me with Qs!

US version. thank you very much @vikingbooks.bsky.social. I like the black cover more!

🚨 New lab paper!🚨 A dream study of mine for nearly 20 yrs not possible until now thanks to NIH 🧠 funding & 1st-author lead @seeber.bsky.social We tracked hippocampal activity as people walked memory-guided paths & imagined them again. Did brain patterns reappear?🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

SO MANY STAND UP FOR SCIENCE EVENTS TO CHOOSE FROM—153 and COUNTING! To get more information on our local events and to register your own, head to www.standupforscience2025.org/local-event-information/ ☀️⬇️🌎

Epistemic biases in human reinforcement learning: behavioral evidence, computational characterization, normative status and possible applications. A quite self-centered review, but with a broad introduction and conclusions and very cool figures. Few main takes will follow osf.io/preprints/ps...

yup, that’s the distinguished scientist Elon Musk FRS @royalsociety.org

Our new paper on the neural systems relating to safety. Great work by Sarah Tashjian and the lab(not on Bluesky).

🧵 How do we know Trump is full of sh** when he shrieks about “hydrants running dry”? Because in 2016, a horrendous wildfire hit Gatlinburg Tennessee. Hydrants ran dry and 14 people died. A higher death toll than the LA Fires. But Tennessee had a GOP governor, so newly-elected Trump posted:

Completely agree with Sam. This system needs to change. We need to bring the money back into research and/ or increase the salaries of post docs etc

FYI - We went to the moon😜. Photos of each of the six Apollo landing sites photographed from low orbit by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The astronauts' tracks, as well as the rover and other items, are clearly visible.

Jupiter and the moon over Toulouse

More than 75 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter urging senators not to confirm RFK Jr. The letter marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice. But Kennedy is a threat they could not ignore, one said. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/h...

I agree - I love this movie

Me on the way home from karaoke after drinking a bottle of soju: ohhh that’s my website

The early steps of rewriting the shameful history of Trump’s 2020 coup attempt.

🧠📈 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... "Enacting welfare legislation [...] without strong scientific evidence is a societal and political choice that risks creating scientific and interpretational problems as well as major policy challenges, including [...] unintended consequences. ... "

This is Ket @ketikagarg.bsky.social; she is a postdoc in the lab and freaking awesome! She put this together over a weekend. Bonus: Ket is on the job market for an Assistant Professor position! Here is her website: ketikagarg.com

First time this has happened.

I’ve personally experienced and seen anger at talks. Likewise, we have all experienced the angry reviewer. Both cases are unprofessional and unscientific. Yes, debate, but anger has no place in science (maybe one exception is pseudoscience or religion rejecting real science…).

Huge congrats to @talvaldivia.bsky.social on her first first-author paper accepted at Emotion! An outstanding contribution to what we know about how children, teens, and young adults bring to mind emotion words. Check it out! Many thanks to coauthors for an excellent collab! osf.io/preprints/os...

Excellent paper from @mjcrockett.bsky.social et al. And gives more reason to leave that toxic shit hole called Twitter/X!

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

The word of the year is “brain rot” These days, it’s invoked by young people on social media to describe the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” particularly stemming from overconsumption of trivial online content. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/a...

100%👇

Wonder how Republicans are going to spin this statement from Pete Hegseth’s OWN MOTHER. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/u...

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984

The sunsets in Toulouse are stunning. Fallen in love with this city(especially its food😀)

"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8

Awesome new paper by @paulbsharp.bsky.social

The dates for the Summer School on Affective Neuroscience are now open! More details to come in the new year!

I feel so honored by the publication of this special issue of Neuropsychologia. Thanks so much to my friends and colleagues who put this together. And thanks to all the contributors. There are so many wonderful articles. I can't tell you how delighted I am. 🧪🧠 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I think this book is the one I’d recommend to every single woman. Teenage girls need to read it. Start early. Women have been socialized completely out of trusting our instincts. I tweeted yesterday that emotions are a COMPASS. And you should not suppress them This book will stay with you #booksky

Congrats @deevybee.bsky.social - I hope others follow until the Royal Society kicks him out!

Nice article on Tariffs - what the economists say. dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories...

Would you go to Bertrand Russell for advice on how to live a virtuous life? Can we separate the singer from the song. His advice is interesting Open Culture www.openculture.com/2024/11/bert...

Ask AI to put our dog on a bike with a Christmas hat on.

Just saw this article by the wonderful Sheena Josselyn on role models. I fully back up what Sheena is saying - Joe (@theamygdaloid.bsky.social) is a great scientist, thinker, and human being. academic.oup.com/cercor/advan...

Here is a piece I wrote on Affective Neuroscience for the new Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. oecs.mit.edu/pub/qwrz95aw... For those interested in human psychology and related fields, I highly recommend reading these free articles. oecs.mit.edu/open-encyclo...