Mirko Thalmann

New work with @marcelbinz.bsky.social & @ericschulz.bsky.social! We introduce a permutation-based ML approach that decomposes behavioral variability into distinct components, bridging prediction & explanation in a single framework, paving the way for better behavioral theories osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to announce that I'll be starting my own lab in Tübingen this October! Hiring at all levels: Postdoc, PhD & RA. Want to work on computational cognitive science at scale? Apply: core-cognition.github.io Reposts and shares much appreciated 🙏

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

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

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

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

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⚡

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/... 🧵⤵️

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.

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...

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