Mirko Thalmann
mirkothm.bsky.social
Mirko Thalmann
@mirkothm.bsky.social
Investigating human cognition by combining knowledge about cognitive processes and mental representations
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?
Model-based exploration is measurable across tasks but not linked to personality and psychiatric assessments
Scientific Reports - Model-based exploration is measurable across tasks but not linked to personality and psychiatric assessments
rdcu.be
July 31, 2025 at 7:38 AM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
📣 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
June 19, 2025 at 1:42 PM
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!
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
doi.org
May 19, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
🚨 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
April 11, 2025 at 8:10 AM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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...
Defragmenting psychology
Nature Human Behaviour - Psychology is fragmented into the study of a myriad of constructs and measures, most of which are used very rarely. This hinders cumulative knowledge generation. We call on...
www.nature.com
March 18, 2025 at 12:34 PM
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
February 28, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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
Towards Automation of Cognitive Modeling using Large Language Models
Computational cognitive models, which formalize theories of cognition, enable researchers to quantify cognitive processes and arbitrate between competing theories by fitting models to behavioral data....
arxiv.org
February 26, 2025 at 10:08 AM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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...
Observed power, and what to do if your editor asks for post-hoc power analyses
This blog post is now included in the paper "Sample size justification" available at PsyArXiv. Observed power (or post-hoc power) is th...
daniellakens.blogspot.com
February 18, 2025 at 2:18 PM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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...
OSF
osf.io
February 10, 2025 at 10:44 AM
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⚡
February 3, 2025 at 1:41 PM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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/...

🧵⤵️
An Inception-Cohort Study Quantifying How Many Registered Studies Are Publicly Shared - Eline N. F. Ensinck, Daniël Lakens, 2025
We quantified how many studies registered on the OSF up to November 2017 are performed but not shared after at least 4 years. Examining a sample of 169 register...
journals.sagepub.com
January 29, 2025 at 4:36 AM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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.
The Collapse of Ego Depletion
Science's Biggest Self-Control Failure
open.substack.com
January 29, 2025 at 2:49 PM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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...
GitHub - marcelbinz/Psych-201
Contribute to marcelbinz/Psych-201 development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
January 27, 2025 at 12:43 PM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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
Building, Reusing, and Generalizing Abstract Representations from Concrete Sequences
Humans excel at learning abstract patterns across different sequences, filtering out irrelevant details, and transferring these generalized concepts to new sequences. In contrast, many sequence learni...
arxiv.org
January 22, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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
January 16, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Mirko Thalmann
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
December 10, 2024 at 9:21 AM