iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 14/07/2026

If you’re at #CPC2026 come and visit Seps poster ! Sep is leading work testing how social environment complexity interacts during learning to form maladaptive beliefs using connectionist models

061

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 16/03/2026

We conducted three experiments (Online, Lab, and VR) using Random Dot Kinematogram (RDK) tasks to test perceptual accuracy and confidence in individuals with CCD. tl;dr: Those with CCD showed normal perceptual accuracy, but poor metacognitive sensitivity.

Results and group comparison from Experiments 1 and 2

110

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 16/03/2026

What connects difficulties in social cognition, self-awareness, and abstract reasoning in those with Corpus Callosum Dysgenesis (CCD)? Here, across three experiments, we find that the corpus callosum is integral to metacognitive efficiency - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Gemini said
This schematic outlines three experiments (Online, Lab, and VR) comparing individuals with Cerebral Cavernous Malformations (CCD) to Neurotypical (NT) controls using Random Dot Kinematograms (RDK).

Panel A: Study Overview
Experiment 1 (Online): 10 CCD vs. 85 NT participants using a computer mouse.

Experiment 2 (Lab): 11 CCD vs. 7 NT participants using a button box.

Experiment 3 (VR): 10 CCD vs. 13 NT participants using a VR headset.

Brain Icon: A blue line divides the hemispheres with a crossed-out arrow, suggesting a focus on disrupted interhemispheric communication.

Panel B: Classic RDK (Exp 1 & 2)
A trial sequence on a grey background:

Fixation (1600ms): A central cross.

Motion (1500ms): A circular field of moving dots (red, blue, and white).

Decision (Unlimited): Selection of "L" or "R" buttons.

Confidence (Unlimited): A slider ranging from "Decrease" to "Increase" to rate certainty.

Panel C: VR RDK (Exp 3)
A faster trial sequence used in the VR environment:

Fixation: Until central fixation is achieved.

Motion (180ms): Dots appear within a narrow vertical rectangle.

Decision (Unlimited): A prompt shows blue/orange bars for direction selection.

Panel D: Visual Presentation (Exp 3)
Diagrams showing how stimuli are mapped from the eyes to the brain hemispheres (L and R):

Binocular: Stimuli presented to both eyes, traveling to both hemispheres.

Lateralised: A 3° shift from center presented to one eye.

Monocular: Stimuli presented to one eye, directed specifically toward the right or left hemifield to isolate hemispheric processing.

2188

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 05/03/2026

Excited to say that Hypatia has secured a second round of funding thanks to the @wellcometrust.bsky.social 💫 This milestone allows us to build the technology and team and conduct validation efforts across the UK and Australia to bridge the ecosystems.

Announcement from Hypatia regarding second-round investment from the Wellcome Trust and 2026 hiring for five roles: Project Coordinator, Backend Engineer, UXUI Engineer, Artist/Designer, and Director of Operations. The graphic showcases Hypatia's international presence in the UK and Australia, featuring team photos and logos of partner institutions including King's College London, UWA, C-FIT, Orygen, and Emyria.

1123

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 18/02/2026

The model offers another multi-agent route to paranoia alongside hypermentalising. If the anomaly detector is tuned too tightly, it yields false +ves. The agent becomes overly defensive against benign peers. This connects generalist accounts of delusions to social contexts.

120

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 18/02/2026

What happens when we can't use recursive belief to compete? We can use anomaly detection instead! Here, we (led by soon-to-be-Dr @nitalon.bsky.social ) devise a multi-agent account where compression & reward expectation are used to notice deception jair.org/index.php/ja...

Two side-by-side images depicting the nested hierarchical IPOMDP and the non-hierarchical x-IPOMDP mechanism.

1187

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 18/12/2025

New job alert 💫 We’re hiring a 3-year postdoc for the NEPTUNE project to study the causal mechanisms of paranoia and social learning. Work with us on experimental psychopharmacology (THC), social cognition, and psychosis 🧑‍🔬 Apply here: lnkd.in/gQqnNvjR](my.corehr.com/pls/kclrecru...) Please RT :)

11214

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 16/12/2025

Full details for the 2026 ToM4AI Workshop @aaai.org are now live (ToM4AI.com) 100+ registrations, 40 papers, 3 keynotes, & a hackathon, spanning cog sci, philosophy, psychiatry, computer science, and robotics @nitalon.bsky.social @stefansarkadi.bsky.social @reuth-mirsky.bsky.social

Poster showing the schedule for Theory of Mind in AI workshop at AAAI 2026, featuring 3 keynote speakers, a hackathon, posters, and flash talks. Sponsored by Edith Cowan University and Ketryx

093

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 03/09/2025

🧠 We're hiring a computational postdoc! 3+ years with me & @mitulamehta.bsky.social on @wellcometrust.bsky.social funded social cognition/paranoia research at the IoPPN. Lead & develop computational work, collaborate with experimentalists on psychosis/THC data. DM for details! lnkd.in/eCMy9Jf5

Computational postdoc ad for KCL funded by the Wellcome Trust on the NEPTUNE project

44236

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 12/06/2025

And that's a wrap! Thanks to all the speakers, moderator and audience participation for such a lively discussion - @nitalon.bsky.social @kartikchandra.bsky.social @carocharp.bsky.social

050

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 17/03/2025

Participants first played a Cyberball game 🏐 and then immediately reported their beliefs about their partner and state paranoia 📝 Following this participants played a social value learning game, The Intentions Game, to understand whether social exclusion impacted future interactions

120

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 03/03/2025

Last but absolutely not least we have Professor Josh Tenenbaum closing out the workshop, talking on reverse engineering human minds to improve synthetic systems

030

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 03/03/2025

Third we have an embodied computer science perspective on Theory of Mind from Prof Sheila McIlraith. Giving robots an epistemic planner can allow for representations and appropriate responses to another’s beliefs and intentions

120

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 03/03/2025

Next up we have Dr Herman de Weerd using agent based modelling to understand the role of recursive cognition on multi agent interaction @unigroningen.bsky.social

131

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 03/03/2025

Today is the day! Our workshop (sites.google.com/view/theory-...) on Theory of Mind in AI kicks off in Philadelphia, and we are lucky enough to have @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social opening the day with a comprehensive overview of how we (un)successfully measure Theory of Mind @nitalon.bsky.social

Rebecca Saxe giving a talk on Theory of Mind

1194

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 16/09/2024

Thanks to Nora Raschle and the Jacob’s Centre for being amazing hosts over the last week for our FENS-Kavli exchange! It was exciting to blend approaches to think about how to best test neurocomputational mechanisms of social cognition in childhood and adolescence 👀 🧒

021

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 04/09/2024

We also show that irrespective of diagnosis, more reported trauma, paranoia, and trait mentalising skills reduce social contagion effects

Psychometric Correlations with Social Contagion

100

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 04/09/2024

This affects learning, whereby those with a diagnosis of BPD are quicker to settle on a belief about their partner and show more rigidity in this belief along both qualities

100

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 04/09/2024

Despite both groups showing equal accuracy in predicting their partner in phase 2, they use very different strategies... those w/ a diag. of BPD show disintegrated self-other representations, whereas those w/o a diagnosis use a full mixing process to generalise information 🧪

100

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 04/09/2024

Simulations show that participants can be defined by how much they care about the absolute reward to the self (alpha) and how much they care about inequality (beta) - self and other uncertainty about each quality drive both learning and social contagion effects

100

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 04/09/2024

To navigate this interaction, ppts. might use a full mixing process to initially predict others based on their preferences, and then use others to inform their preferences (Model 1), they may use none of these constraints (Model 4), or only one of these (Model 2 & 3) 🧪

100

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 04/09/2024

We used a short 3-phase dynamic social paradigm to test how matched groups w/ and w/o a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder interact and learn about a partner's social preferences. We used a dynamic architecture to ensure partner similarity was ~50%

100

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 19/10/2023

Great to be at the Wellcome today for their mental health and neuroscience symposium - starting off with a great overview from prof Jeremy Hall on the intersection of neural techniques to test the biological basis of psychiatric disorder #Neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

081

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 17/10/2023

We discuss the state-of-the-art in how this framework accommodates dysfunctional ToM, the neuroscience of ToM, ToM within AI, and future directions for the field. We use novel and existing model sims to make precise claims about how humans and AI interact in social settings.

101

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 17/10/2023

Here we present formal generative principles of social representation and inference as a general research framework that provides a language for expressing falsifiable theories that explain what ToM is, and what it is not.

110

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 10/10/2023

First joint contribution of the FENS-Kavli Bordeaux meeting 2023 🧑‍🍳 - there were also pictures of us in paper chef hats but I’ll spare you. #Neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #ComputationalSkychiatry

1102