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...pre-exclusion in the cyberball (relatively trivial exclusion!) increased state paranoia, and caused adolescents to become less sensitive to incoming social cues, making participants' beliefs more fixed and diminishing the impact of other-to-self information transfer.

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We found that adolescents typically learn via "social contagion" (becoming more like their partner after observation) rather than "self-insertion" (assuming others will act like them, as in our previous adult samples). Being excluded within the cyberball pre-task alters this learning process...

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502 adolescents (15-17) played an interactive pre-task Cyberball, where they were either excluded or included, and then took part in the Intentions Game (elifesciences.org/articles/104...) to make and predict another's social decisions. We examined both behavioural and computational outcomes...

elifesciences.org

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Sepehr Razavi @srazavi.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

How do exclusion and adversity drive social learning in adolescence? Here, @drjk.bsky.social, Lyn Ellett and I show that social exclusion reduces adolescent belief flexibility about others at a later point in time, and reduces the ability to generalise from social cues - 🧵 1/5

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Reposted by Joe Barnby

This Thursday, we’re delighted to welcome @carocharp.bsky.social, PI of the Social Learning and Decisions Lab at the University of Maryland. She will be delivering what promises to be an insightful talk: 'Seeking advice and seeking feedback: cognitive mechanisms and relevance for psychopathology.'

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This was work conducted over 5 years (started during my postdoc!) and would not have happened without the participation and support of wonderful charities such as AusDoCC (ausdocc.org.au) and the NoDCC (nodcc.org)

We suggest that the absence of a CC is causing a nonsystematic computational failure. This would explain why those with CCD struggle to notice social and reasoning errors in classic neuropsych tests, and suggests a crucial role of the CC in metacognition code/data: github.com/Brain-Develo...

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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

Sepehr Razavi @srazavi.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

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.

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Reposted by Joe Barnby

Very happy to announce next week's SoCR lab guest, Andreas Hula, who will be talking about the uses and misuses of I-POMDPs in model-building human social decision-making 🧵

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

We are incredibly grateful to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @kingsioppn.bsky.social, University of Western Australia, and @perroninstitute.bsky.social for supporting the vision. If you're into computational modelling, mental health, or UX, watch out for the application links.

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

The new funding will expand our team, develop our cognitive fingerprinting tech, and fund essential validation. We’re partnering with Emyria (WA), @orygen.org.au (VIC), and C-FIT (KCL; London) to build a seamless clinical UXUI and a platform ready for treatment development.

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.

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Work put together with the excellent @nitalon.bsky.social @stefansarkadi.bsky.social Lion Schulz Jeff Rosenschein & Peter Dayan

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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.

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With this, more equitable social outcomes are achieved, and exploitation is reduced when compression & expectation are tuned within normal bounds. It provides a plausible, mechanistic formal framework in which agents can compete without recursion.

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It augments agents with and ℵ-IPOMDP mechanism: 1. Anomaly Detection mechanisms: "My predictions are consistently wrong." 2. Out-of-Belief Policy: A severely 'defensive' response. In effect: 'I don't know _how_ you're tricking me, but I know you are, so stop or we'll both suffer'

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In recursive modeling (I think that you think...), agents eventually hit a cognitive limit. It’s a logical trap - humans can't just "think harder" forever. It might also be the case that humans infrequently want to avoid using recursive strategies when they can -

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Sepehr Razavi @srazavi.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

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.

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Reposted by Joe Barnby

It's a pleasure for me to announce our next Social Computation and Representation Lab invited speaker @mkwittmann.bsky.social for a talk on dimensionality reduction and basis functions in social cognition

Talk Poster, Prof. Marco Wittmann, 19/02/2026 @ 9am GMT

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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 :)

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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

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

Would be fun to chat about whether your data also conforms to our model of self-other generalisation... its in the correct format (and uses a fehr-schmidt function as in ours) so it would be quite straght forward to fit!

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

The utility function captures the latent/type of partner within a phase, but I meant between phases. The way we formulate it is to say that representations of self and other have some degree of porosity, so the latents that define each transfer a bit between phases.

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 13/12/2025

We found a very similar thing! you mention that an RL generalisation model didn’t quite fit vs the utility model, but did you try the utility model with a generalisation component? Would be keen to see if your data fitted our model well elifesciences.org/articles/104...

elifesciences.org

Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 10/12/2025

Yes I think this complexity is certainly front-and-centre in our appraisal of the results, although we do see some (tentative) evidence of symptom specificity. We're digging into this further.

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Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 09/12/2025

Yes that would be really satisfying, both if this model could distinguish therapies or track reported improvement in interpersonal satisfaction - I suspect the story will be far more complex and against my best predictions, but one can hope :)

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Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 09/12/2025

My prediction would be that, like our Elife paper, raw predictive accuracy would not change, but the process to get there would be more integrated (with successful therapy, folks would become less model M4 and more model M1, as defined in the paper) - we're working on testing this 👀