In a tour-de-force Rheza conducted five social learning experiments looking at how learning and deciding in the context of other people influences the tendency to fall into these traps.

Several years ago Alex Rich and I developed this task called the "attentional learning trap" wherein learners in a reinforcement learning task get robustly "trapped" in a suboptimal belief due to self-reinforcing patterns of avoidance. This pattern is rock solid 🪨 and has been replicated many times.

tryin' to be in the band, not the band manager. todd.gureckislab.org/2024/09/25/l...

The mental simulation adversarial collaboration continues... #cogsci2025

Congrats to Doug Medin on becoming the next Rumelhart prize winner! 🏆 My “academic grandpa” through multiple pathways! #cogsci2025

Of particular note is that Smile provides a “developer mode” interface overlaid on top of your experiment which allow you to jump around in your task, autofill out forms with a single button, and perform “brain surgery” on your task without a debugger. You can test your design on multiple devices.

Today we open-sourced a new project for developing behavioral experiments online. It is called Smile. Announcement of v0.1.0: todd.gureckislab.org/2025/07/22/s... Smile has been used internally in my lab for several years and has substantially increased our productivity.

the goal of any federal science funding body facing major cuts should be to help prop science operated in ways more independent of gov $. fund citizen science, fund open data repositories, fund crowdfunding, fund open-source tools and infrastructure. specific science projects can wait.

checked what embarrassing
'woke' NSF projects dinged @ NYU. Surprised to see this project on quantum gravity listed. It, mildly, says an outcome would be the 'sustained growth' of women in high energy physics (PI is a woman). someone important and loud needs to clap back at this nonsense.

from the old place