iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

As for next steps, I’m super happy to be continuing at The University of Melbourne, teaching into the new Major of Business Analytics alongside continuing my existing research program 🤘🤘 🤘

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I also want to thank Peter Bossaerts and Juan Pablo Franco for their guidance, Michelle Lee and Hassan Andrabi for their friendship, Sebastian Gluth and Dragan Rangelov for their generosity and time in examining my thesis, and the Faculty of Business and Economics for funding my research and travel.

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Carsten and Nitin have also helped set a fantastic culture at the @unimelb-cbmm.bsky.social and I doubt I’d be in this position without such a supportive, collaborative, and fun environment where I enjoyed coming to work each day.

Very grateful for all the support I've had throughout, especially from my family, friends, and my wonderful main supervisors, @carstenmurawski.bsky.social and Nitin Yadav. They backed me from day one and always gave me the confidence that we’d get here eventually.

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But it wasn’t all smooth sailing, having to navigate the pandemic, failing a subject in my coursework, and the death of a parent along the way.

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A lot has happened over these near-7 years: publishing papers 📜, travelling to Singapore, Portugal, and the Netherlands to present my work 🇸🇬🇵🇹🇳🇱, and meeting heaps of interesting and super-smart people.

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

It’s official! 🎓 My PhD - The effects of computational resource requirements and cognitive capacities on human decision-making - has finally been conferred 😁.

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Keen to hear other views, fight me in the comments!

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Recently, I got quite frustrated listening to a large group of economists discussing preregistration and pre analysis plans. So, I've channelled that into an argument for why they should be preregistering their work whenever performing confirmatory research kdoroc.substack.com/p/arguing-wi...

kdoroc.substack.com

Arguing with economists: the case for preregistration

At a recent economics conference there was a long discussion on preregistration where we heard questions and comments from ~20 different people at varying levels of seniority.

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Finally, a massive thanks to the organisers, including Joshua Miller, Max R. P. Grossmann, Mia Tam, and Leo Bao among others for two fantastic events. Time for Indiana Jones to officially retire from my slide decks! 🤠 #ExperimentalEconomics #DecisionScience #APESA2026 #SEF2026 #AcademicSky

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Also great to see the Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets out in full force! 💪 Huge shoutout to Michelle Lee, Zheng Li, Hassan Andrabi, Andy Xu, Hoang Long Nguyen, Helena Luo, & Michele Garagnani for stellar presentations.

ℹ️ ChienHsun Lin found that a strong preference for a specific type of information (like percentages) actually correlates with worse decision-making. A fascinating implication for metacognition and self-awareness!

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💵 Kieran Gibson showed convincing evidence that motivation isn't additive—adding a less desirable incentive can actually reduce effort. ⏳ Stephen Cheung highlighted how glossing over a model's functional form when analysing intertemporal choice can lead to false conclusions about present bias.

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Saw some brilliant talks. 🧠 Ryan Oprea's keynote showed how noisy cognition explains key behavioral econ findings. Nice to know I’m not the only fan of Herb Simon’s scissors analogy (even if we still don't know what he was cutting ✂️).

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I presented my work on how healthy cognitive ageing impacts decision-making capacity under varying computational demands. It was reassuring to know that economists have an increasing interest in cognition! Read the preprint here: 🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

End of an era! 🤠🌅 Last week I gave what will likely be my final PhD presentations at the regional meetings of the Society for Experimental Finance & the Economic Science Association. The notorious "economist Q&A" rumors were greatly exaggerated—everyone was lovely! 🧵👇

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Enough is enough. Support our teachers to get what they deserve: a fair pay rise and improved working conditions. Email your MP, join the rally and march from Trades Hall this morning (10.30am), and be kind and supportive to the teachers in your lives.

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

🔹 We have the lowest paid teachers in the country. 🔹 The state government's latest (rejected) offer would still leave our teachers well behind most states and territories. 🔹 The teaching union's demands would see Victorian teachers reach par with those in NSW.

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Today, public school teachers in Victoria are going on strike 🎳⚾🎳. Here's what you need to know 👇📜

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Why do you think "normal" levels of perceived chronic stress didn't impair decision-making in this broad sample? We'd love to hear your thoughts and critiques as look to get this published! 🗣️

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The Nuance 🔍: Bayesian stats allows us to say we found strong evidence for a null result. Exploratory analyses hint at tentative negative effects in specific subgroups (but take this with a lot of 🧂): 🔹 Younger adults (18-27) 🔹 The tertiary-educated 🔹 Those with lower baseline processing speed

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The Plot Twist 🤔: Higher levels of perceived chronic stress had NO credible effect on decision-making capacity or basic cognition—even when decisions were highly demanding! Instead of a cognitive collapse, we found surprising resilience. 💪

Figure 2 shows posterior distributions for the coefficient on perceived chronic stress in each task. Panel A shows that the coefficient's HDI contain zero for all 6 tasks. Panel B shows the coefficient for the full sample and for three subgroups (younger, tertiary educated, and low processing speed individuals) in the Knapsack optimisation task. All four HDIs contain zero, but the point estimates are more negative for each subgroup.

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We asked 355 broadly representative US adults how stressed they were, then gave them a complex decision-making task (Knapsack Optimisation) + cognitive tests. Crucially, we varied the computational demands of decisions to see exactly where stressed people would break.

Figure 1 showing the task design: perceived chronic stress measured with 3 questionnaires (the PSS, PSQ, and TICS), decision-making measured with the Knapsack Optimisation Task, and basic cognition measured with the recall-1-back, number-letter, stop signal, digit symbol substitution, and progressive matrices tasks.

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Chronic stress is a modern health epidemic that shortens lives, lowers quality of life, and costs billions. We thought it would break our ability to make good decisions. We were wrong. 📉🧠 New preprint on stress and decision-making under varying computational demands. 🧵👇 🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Huge shoutout to my lab mates Zheng Li, Hassan Andrabi, and Hoang Long Nguyen who did an absolutely stellar job delivering their (first?) conference talks! 👏 Big thanks to the organisers, especially Cloudy, for a fantastic event. #MathPsych #CogSci #Ageing #AcademicSky #DecisionScience #AMPC2026

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🐸 Michael Lee on frogs, wisdom of the crowd & cognitive modelling. Amazing how tweaking a model to include a small part of the external environment boosts AUC-ROC so dramatically! 💎 Tan Zhi-Xuan on modelling boundedly rational planners with Bayesian PGMs in a fun jewel-themed task.

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Beyond presenting, it was a great few days of talks. Some of my favourites were: 🚸 @merrickgiles.bsky.social on Bayesian modelling of children's arithmetic strategy selection. 🧠 @williamngiam.github.io arguing classical similarity methods don't capture working memory representations

If you're interested in how healthy cognitive ageing impacts our capacity for decision-making in computationally easier and harder choices, you can read the full preprint: 🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps... I'm actively looking for feedback, so please let me know your thoughts! 🧠📊

osf.io

OSF

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Indiana Jones' tour of the Healthy Cognitive Ageing speaking circuit continued in Singapore last week at the Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference 🤠🇸🇬 I spoke about decision-making with healthy ageing under varying computational demands + snagged an award for Best Student Talk 🏆🧵👇

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Or if you want to just get straight to the paper, here it is www.nature.com/articles/s44...

nature.com

Client Challenge

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

If you're intrigued and want more of the technical details, check out this thread 👇 bsky.app/profile/karl...

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Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Excited to see our research on stress and decision-making featured in Pursuit today 😁 It's great to see these findings reaching a wider audience and I hope people find it interesting! Read the full story here: pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/str... #DecisionScience #Stress #Psychology #SciComm

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au

Stressed and rushed? Your decisions might suffer

New University of Melbourne research reveals how the combination of stress and time pressure can wreak havoc on our ability to make good choices

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P.S. if you're interested in the slides, there is a version of them up on my website: karlodoroc.com

karlodoroc.com

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Leaving with plenty of new ideas! Huge thanks to the organisers at @acnsau.bsky.social for such a seamless event. #ACNS2025 #CognitiveNeuroscience #Ageing #BrainHealth #DecisionMaking #AcademicSky

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And Isaac Saywell on Parkinson's disease. He broke down how variability in cognitive reserve and brain structure underlies cognitive performance.

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Fascinating work from Elizabeth Fisher on psilocybin and decision-making. 🍄 She used computational modelling to understand post-acute decision dynamics in rats. Really interesting stuff, looking forward to seeing some similar work in humans!

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Reuben Rideaux gave a stellar keynote on brain efficiency. 🧠 He explored mechanisms like serial dependence and adaptive encoding—along with some great insights on how biological efficiency can inspire the next wave of AI. 🤖

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First, Juan Pablo Franco with a poster on using fitness landscape analysis to measure the computational demands of optimization tasks. Incredibly cool method to quantify computational hardness / demands (though I might be biased! 😉).

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Indiana Jones and the Temple of... Cognitive Ageing? 🤠🧠 Wrapping up a big month at #ACNS2025! I presented my work on how healthy ageing impacts decision-making capacity. 📄 Read the full preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps... A few highlights from the conference below👇

Karlo Doroc @karlodoroc.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Check out this thread for a rundown bsky.app/profile/karl...

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These findings highlight that stress is not a monolith. Its impact on higher order cognition is heavily moderated by resource constraints (time), even at relatively low levels of complexity. Reducing time pressure may preserve our decision quality even when stress is high.

Caveats: our most exciting results were exploratory findings and not explicitly designed for in the study. Confirmatory work will be needed that directly tests for the effects of time pressure, pessimism, and changes in attention. A larger, more diverse sample would also be nice!

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Eye-tracking data suggests altered attention as one potential mechanism. Under stress + time pressure, gaze behaviour shifted: 👁️ More items visited ⏱️ Shorter dwell time per item These gaze-related results are tentative, but warrant future investigation.

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What led to this? Under stress + time pressure, participants didn't become more random. They started to answer "No" more often. They appeared to become more "pessimistic," incorrectly rejecting satisfiable instances (i.e., missing beneficial opportunities).

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