Fred Callaway
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fredcallaway.bsky.social
Fred Callaway
@fredcallaway.bsky.social
610 followers 540 following 74 posts
I study how people solve big problems with small brains. Starting at Dartmouth in 2026—I'm recruiting!

https://fredcallaway.com
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Reposted by Fred Callaway
jsphillips.bsky.social
We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/
Cognitive Science Graduate Admissions – Information about graduate admissions from the cognitive science faculty
sites.dartmouth.edu
October 23, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
nicolecrust.bsky.social
Yes! @upenn.edu declines signing The Compact. I'm proud of this decision.
Earlier today, I informed the U.S. Department of Education that Penn respectfully declines to sign the proposed Compact. As requested, we also provided focused feedback highlighting areas of existing alignment as well as substantive concerns.
October 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
paulbsharp.bsky.social
1st Sharp Lab preprint! 🚨 We tested how anxiety affects task generalization—not how people generalize threat stimuli, but how they reuse action-outcome structures when planning in new contexts.

Worry makes people avoid reusing actions that co-occurred w/ threat!
📄: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵 1/12
October 13, 2025 at 6:30 AM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
kjha02.bsky.social
Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")?

Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior!

shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...
October 3, 2025 at 2:24 AM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
modirshanechi.bsky.social
New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence
September 28, 2025 at 11:07 AM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
xrg.bsky.social
We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)
Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.
September 15, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
tessforest.bsky.social
Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...
<em>Child Development</em> | SRCD Journal | Wiley Online Library
Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather i...
srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
August 6, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
maxkw.bsky.social
Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"!

Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS
Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...
www.pnas.org
July 22, 2025 at 6:04 AM
fredcallaway.bsky.social
Centaur's performance may be largely driven by learning a good model of behavioral auto-regression—independent of the task. An important lesson for cognitive modelers: higher likelihood ≠ better account of behavior.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
July 14, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
skjerns.de
preprint alert 🚨
1/ Can we accurately detect sequential replay in humans using Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling (#TDLM)? In our recent study, we could not find any replay and decided to dig deeper by running a hybrid simulation with surprising results. Link to preprint & details below 👇
June 16, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
aforli89.bsky.social
Our study is out in Nature!
Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models.

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Replay and representation dynamics in the hippocampus of freely flying bats - Nature
Nature - Replay and representation dynamics in the hippocampus of freely flying bats
www.nature.com
July 9, 2025 at 3:08 PM
fredcallaway.bsky.social
I asked ChatGPT to respond to this critique. It replies:

"That’s a sharp observation—and honestly, a fair one. ChatGPT can sound overly agreeable or eager to please, much like..."
Image of ChatGPT output, which reads: That’s a sharp observation—and honestly, a fair one. ChatGPT can sound overly agreeable or eager to please, much like the tone often found in author rebuttals to peer review. That tone is partly intentional: it’s designed to be polite, constructive, and deferential to the user. But you’re right—it can veer into sycophancy, especially when clarity or critical thinking should take precedence over friendliness. As for contradicting itself while continuing to “agree”: that’s a deeper issue. It can happen when the model tries to accommodate multiple inputs without weighing them critically or fails to maintain internal consistency across a longer exchange. The root problem isn’t just tone—it’s a mix of conversational bias, lack of persistent memory, and insufficient pushback against flawed logic. So yes, the comparison to author response letters is apt. And unlike those letters, ChatGPT doesn’t have professional incentives to fake deference—but the algorithmic incentives can still push it in that direction. Would you prefer a more candid, opinionated tone from me in general?
July 9, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
electricland.bsky.social
Stop spreading this garbage about em dashes in ACTUAL EDITED PROSE OH MY GOD.

Plenty of actual human beings know how to type em dashes! We’re called “writers” and “editors” — maybe you’ve heard of us?
Feline Feces (lib catturd) @kitttenn.bsky.social M dashes (the long dash) are a dead giveaway. LLMs love using them for some reason, while actual human beings have no idea how to type that into the computer. They also love sets of three, overtly parallel structure, and impersonal writing. July 6, 2025 at 2:16 PM 1 quote 12 likes
July 6, 2025 at 10:16 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
chriswolfvision.bsky.social
After all these reports of authors adding language instructions for LLM reviews in their papers I wanted to check this myself and I downloaded the .tex source from one of these papers.

Here is an example.
(I will not share the identity of the paper)
July 5, 2025 at 5:12 PM
fredcallaway.bsky.social
Evidence for model-based meta-control? I look forward to reading!
paulbsharp.bsky.social Paul Sharp @paulbsharp.bsky.social · Jul 5
🚨New preprint! WHEN should we plan toward a goal? Most research focuses on how and where to plan, but the timing of planning initiation has been overlooked. We show humans leverage a cognitive map - called model-based meta-control - to learn when to deploy a plan.
🧵(1/15)
osf.io/preprints/ps...
July 5, 2025 at 3:39 PM
fredcallaway.bsky.social
🔥Hot Take: When you quote the middle of a sentence at the end of your sentence, the period should be *after* the quote, as in "the middle of a sentence". Don't put your punctuation in my mouth.
June 25, 2025 at 12:08 AM
fredcallaway.bsky.social
Super excited for this conference on mental health and adaptation to uncertainty. Remarkable how the organizers built a speaker lineup that is so interdisciplinary and yet so thematically focused. And the location certainly doesn't hurt...

www.fens.org/news-activit...
June 24, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
xkcd.com
Tukey

xkcd.com/3104/
Comic. [block quote] “Far better an approximate answer to the *right* question, which is often vague, than an *exact* answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.” -John W. Tukey, The Future of Data Analysis (1962) [caption] Happy Approximate Birthday to John Tukey, author of my favorite statistics quote, who was born 110.000 years ago sometime this week.
June 23, 2025 at 10:36 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
prowag.bsky.social
Our latest @cccr.bsky.social survey reveals how unpopular the president’s most notable policy changes are with the American public. The survey also highlights the diversity of views within the GOP, related to their information diets, as well as US economic attitudes. cccr.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...
cccr.wisc.edu
June 19, 2025 at 5:44 PM
fredcallaway.bsky.social
Compelling and thorough evidence for a very cool idea. Awesome paper.
June 10, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
arikahn.bsky.social
I'm thrilled to announce that I will start as an Assistant Professor in Psychology & Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona in Jan 2026! My lab will investigate human planning and decision making through a combination of computational models, behavior, and fMRI (1/2)
June 5, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
marloscmachado.bsky.social
📢 I'm happy to share the preprint: _Reward-Aware Proto-Representations in Reinforcement Learning_ ‼️

My PhD student, Hon Tik Tse, led this work, and my MSc student, Siddarth Chandrasekar, assisted us.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.16217

Basically, it's the SR with rewards. See below 👇
May 24, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
xrg.bsky.social
the functional form of moral judgment is (sometimes) the nash bargaining solution

new preprint👇
figure 2 from our preprint, reporting the results from two experiments we measure moral judgments about dividing money between two parties and manipulate the degree of asymmetry in the outside options each party has we find that moral judgments track predictions from rational bargaining models like the nash bargaining solution and the kalai-smorodinsky solution in a negotiation context by contrast, in a donation context, moral intuitions completely reverse, instead tracking redistributive and egalitarian principles preprint link: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3uqks_v1
May 20, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Fred Callaway
neurograce.bsky.social
Because we must build good things while we scream about the bad, I have started a "Data for Good" team @data-for-good-team.bsky.social that partners with organizations needing short-term data science help. We have three projects ongoing & will add more as our capacity grows.
data-for-good-team.org
May 10, 2025 at 3:33 PM