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Gustav Markkula

@markkula.bsky.social
3.1K followers 874 following 172 posts

Prof at Leeds trying to model human behaviour, the weirder the better Into road safety, neuroscience, machine learning, and connections between fundamental and applied science environment.leeds.ac.uk/transport/s…

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Reposted by Gustav Markkula
Herbert Wu @herbertwu.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
First study out! Using a new cooperative paradigm and multi-agent inverse RL, we show that mice spontaneously adopt leader/follower roles, and the prefrontal cortex encodes these role dynamics and an egocentric social value map of the partner’s position. (1/3) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Asymmetric prefrontal representations for leader–follower dynamics - Nature
Mice spontaneously form leader and follower roles during cooperation, and the medial prefrontal cortex encodes these role dynamics and an egocentric social value map of the partner’s position.
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Reposted by Gustav Markkula
Liron Rozenkrantz @lironrozenkrantz.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
🔥🔥New paper alert! Super excited to share our paper, out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the wonderful Dr. Nofar Mizrachi! nature.com/articles/s41... To me, this finding fundamentally changes how we should think about the relationship between cognition and immune regulation:
nature.com
Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans - Nature Human Behaviour
Mizrachi et al. show that directing attention to bodily sensations, rather than away, promotes more regulated acute inflammatory responses in healthy volunteers, revealing sensory and vagal pathways l...
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I love the little art surprises you get sometimes when plotting 2D data
A 2D histogram / heat map making accidental abstract art
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
📢Preprint alert! In recent years, a lot of effort has been put into developing machine-learned models of road user behaviour, mainly motivated by use cases in automated driving - but what if we instead put these models to use to predict road safety in human traffic? 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2606.12500
arxiv.org
Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation
Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned roa...
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
I had a great time, thanks a lot @rodmurraysmith.bsky.social and team for inviting me. A lovely community and a lovely event - I’ll be back!
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Really looking forward to this event - thanks for the invite!
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Reposted by Gustav Markkula
PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Currently experiencing a quantum superposition of joy and grief: I know that the decision about my funding application has been made, but I am yet to be informed of the outcome 🎉😭🧪
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will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
all academic applications should have consolation prizes. doesn’t have to be much, like a mug that says “i applied for leverhulme 2020” or a t-shirt “UKRI reject 2023”
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Federico D’Agostino @fededagos.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
🚨 New paper at #NeurIPS2025! A systematic fixation-level comparison of a performance-optimized DNN scanpath model and a mechanistic cognitive model reveals behaviourally relevant mechanisms that can be added to the mechanistic model to substantially improve performance. 🧵👇
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
Received sort of promising reviews for a grant, so there’s a small chance I’ll have some positive news by Christmas, and suddenly I find myself *very* capable of empathising with my 10yo when he’s obsessing and anxious over whether he’ll get his wishes from Santa 🎅😱🧪
media.tenor.com
a child is crying while sitting on santa 's lap .
ALT: a child is crying while sitting on santa 's lap .
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
🥳 Cool new paper by Siwei Ma, where evidence acc models and EEG data tell the same story: the effects of being cognitively loaded while deciding whether to cross the street can be understood as making us less sensitive to the available perceptual evidence 🧪🧠📈 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Stimulus and response locked centroparietal EEG are both flatter when under cognitive load than otherwise, this includes the ”CPP” style peak at response
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
🚨Preprint! Yueyang Wang is bringing his human behaviour modelling out of the VR lab, showing that by constraining deep multi-agent RL with human-like perceptual and motor limitations, a very small real-world dataset is sufficient to outperform a behaviour cloning baseline arxiv.org/abs/2510.27383
arxiv.org
Realistic pedestrian-driver interaction modelling using multi-agent RL with human perceptual-motor constraints
Modelling pedestrian-driver interactions is critical for understanding human road user behaviour and developing safe autonomous vehicle systems. Existing approaches often rely on rule-based logic, gam...
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Reposted by Gustav Markkula
İbrahim Öztürk @ibrahimozturk.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
It is my pleasure to share that in 2028, we will be hosting the 9th International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP9). Exciting times ahead, we can’t wait to welcome you! @markkula.bsky.social, @hfs-its-leeds.bsky.social, @envleeds.bsky.social, @universityofleeds.bsky.social
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Ben Hayden @benhayden.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature
The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...
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Human Factors and Safety Group & Virtuocity @hfs-its-leeds.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
New publication 📢 "Testing the Validity of Multiparticipant Distributed Simulation for Understanding and Modeling Road User Interaction" led by Amir Hossein Kalantari together with Yi-Shin Lin, Ali Mohammadi, Natasha Merat OBE, and @markkula.bsky.social. Access: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...
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Akira Miyake @amiyake.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
I love this experience-sampling study on the absolute pitch of earworms! It's a really nicely done study conducted in everyday settings. The link to this paper (open access) is provided below. It is also featured in a podcast (tinyurl.com/4ydrw5zp) by the Psychonomic Society. Congrats!
link.springer.com
Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
Memory for isolated absolute pitches is extremely rare in Western, English-speaking populations. However, past research has found that people can voluntarily reproduce well-known songs in the original...
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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Oh so it does have phd level intelligence
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Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, PhD @mbonsma.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
When your city has an open data portal with the location of every tree, you can do this:
vancouverisawesome.com
Between two trees: Vancouver man maps more than 2,600 places to hang a hammock
He had the idea while hanging in a hammock.
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Tal Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
i wrote about what it feels like to live in the collapse of the american empire "a flake of shale in a great upheaval of the earth" buttondown.com/theswordandt...
buttondown.com
Writing into the Wreck
I, for one, never asked to live in a collapsing empire. The feeling of what you thought to be solid ground turning to a shower of scree under your feet, the...
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Stephan Lewandowsky @lewan.uk · 19/06/2025
I am privileged to announce the publication of the Anti-Autocracy Handbook: sks.to/autocracy 1/12
sks.to
The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding
The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to ...
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
I’ve never been fully into neither chess nor boxing, but I’ve just learned of the existence of what seems like the perfect sport so now maybe I have to! Invented by Enki Bilal no less en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_b...
en.m.wikipedia.org
Chess boxing - Wikipedia
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Adam Sternbergh @sternbergh.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away
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That Mack @thatmc.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Willie Brown Middle School is a San Francisco 6-8 in the Bayview District. For the entire ‘24-‘25 school year, I have been driving the 44 O’Shaughnessy bus that stops there right after school gets out. That trip has been the busiest and most challenging part of my working day.
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Ole Kiehn @olekiehn.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
Excited to present our study in ‪@natneuro.nature.com‬: a deep brain pathway that triggers safety-driven movement—overriding needs like finding food or social contacts. A look into how the brain weighs deep instincts. Congrats to all and first author @nkrauth.bsky.social. shorturl.at/toYFN
shorturl.at
A hypothalamus–brainstem circuit governs the prioritization of safety over essential needs - Nature Neuroscience
Animals need to adapt behavior to balance survival with fulfillment of essential needs. Krauth et al. identify neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that, when activated, prioritize survival over other ...
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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
New Substack post It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...
thomscottphillips.substack.com
Happy In Theory
This is the short story of my long, 20 year search for a stable academic home. There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending.
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
Haha the reverse mullet theory of academic publishing
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What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? @whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com · 20/05/2025
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
Great post, and can definitely be read as film noir voiceover in places
Film noir detective looking out a window, and a screenshot from the linked post: “Moving forward, I would have to be more skeptical, even (or perhaps especially) of high-impact papers with impressive results.”
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Lucretia Baskin @lucretiab.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
If you’re not reading Talia Lavin’s wonderful series about sandwiches, you should totally start.
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 09/05/2025
Folks, always share your code. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be helpful. And if you feel that it’s still too messy or not sufficiently clean to be shared, you shouldn’t submit yet. After all, there could be mistakes in your mess.
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ARC-COGITATE @arc-cogitate.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
Our @nature.com paper is out! Bringing together 2 major theories of consciousness - Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) - in an unprecedented collaboration. Here’s the story of how we advanced theory testing in neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
📣 PhD opportunity with our lovely group in Leeds! Models of human behaviour are essential for developing/testing automated vehicles, but how do we know that these human models are *good enough*? Fully funded, open to all nationalities, apply by May 31! 🚶🚴🚗🤖🧠📈🧪 phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/2244...
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
Amazing days at Champalimaud Neuroscience @champalimaudr.bsky.social in Lisbon, discussing how animals, humans, and human road users do sensorimotor control. Super smart super friendly people, and my reading list has exploded. 😅Thanks so much for the invite Alfonso Renart and colleagues!
Champalimaud Foundation, right next to the seaMe in front of the Champalimaud building, complete with indoors palm trees and midair tubular glass corridorTorre Belém A custard pasteis, perfectly flaky and still warm from the oven, and a cafe pingado
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 27/04/2025
This resonates, good thread overall But it’s maybe not only about not wanting to think, but also a worry of not being able to think well enough, and mitigating that worry by outsourcing the thinking to something which sounds smarter and more confident than you feel
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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 25/04/2025
A putative neural correlate of mood! One big (scandalous?) idea, simple analyses, and the STRONGEST brain/behavior correlation I've EVER seen (which is shocking, given that it's mood). Work with: You-Ping Yang, @catrinahacker.bsky.social and Veit Stuphorn. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
The representation of mood in primate anterior insular cortex
Understanding how the brain reflects and shapes mood requires resolving the disconnect between behavioral measures of mood that can only be made in humans (typically based on subjective reports of hap...
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Prof Jenny Rohn @jennyrohn.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
The three stages of responding to referee comments: Draft 1: letting it rip. Draft 2: removing all the rip. Draft 3: adding a dash of courteous language that would not be out of place in the gentile drawing rooms of Bridgerton.
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Thomas Yeo @bttyeo.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
While the world burns, we cook up a new preprint! doi.org/10.1101/2025... Biophysical modeling is a key tool to derive mechanistic insights into the brain. These models are governed by biologically meaningful parameters (unlike artificial neural networks), but the dirty secret ... 1/N
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
We show that eye-movements are selected based on effort minimization - finally final in @elife.bsky.social eLife's digest: elifesciences.org/digests/9776... & the 'convincing & important' paper: elifesciences.org/articles/97760 I consider this my coolest ever project! #VisionScience #Neuroscience
elifesciences.org
A move you can afford
Where a person will look next can be predicted based on how much it costs the brain to move the eyes in that direction.
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Human Factors and Safety Group & Virtuocity @hfs-its-leeds.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Excited to share new publication, “Cyclists’ interactions with professional and non-professional drivers: Observations and game theoretic models”, led by Ali mohammadi, with co-authors Amir Hossein Kalantari, our own @markkula.bsky.social, and Marco Dozza. doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...
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JJ @jjodx.eurosky.social · 15/03/2025
I guess this is the right moment for this again (sigh…) digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/...
digitalsynopsis.com
This Brilliant Comic Strip On Rich Vs Poor Upbringing Shows What Privilege Is All About
Auckland-based illustrator Toby Morris reminds us that not everyone gets the same privileges in life, with this brilliant comic titled "On a Plate". The
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Retro Computers @retrocomps.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS FOR THE COMMODORE 64 (Source.)
A book that reads in block sans serif font, "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS FOR THE COMMODORE 64." The text is red, switching to gold for the words 'Commodore 64'. Cover bottom, a Commodore 64 - a light brown all-in-one microcomputer with dark brown keys - appears. In the center, a gold PCB in the shape of a human head radiates gold wires in the way wires might radiate from a chip, creating the silhouette of a head; in the center and neck of the head-shaped PCB, chips appear.
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T. Anderson Keller @andykeller.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
In the physical world, almost all information is transmitted through traveling waves -- why should it be any different in your neural network? Super excited to share recent work with the brilliant @mozesjacobs.bsky.social: "Traveling Waves Integrate Spatial Information Through Time" 1/14
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 11/03/2025
😬
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
Folks waiting for the AI in education bubble to pop have their head in the sand. This isn't coming top down, this is bottom up from the students. Helping students figure out how to not let AI usage harm their learning is now critical. Some things I've been trying below, curious for other ideas:
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Pekka Väänänen @pekkavaa.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
If you've ever wanted to learn how the transformer architecture in general or latent multi-head attention works, here's an excellent visual explainer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VLA...
youtube.com
The Genius of DeepSeek’s 57X Efficiency Boost [MLA]
YouTube video by Welch Labs
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Gustav Markkula @markkula.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
👇 Awesome post. Sometimes I feel we should drop conventional scientific publication and all just (“just”) write beautiful blog posts like this one instead
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Jack Stilgoe @jackstilgoe.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
This is a canary in the mine for real-world automation. With little time to think about safety or responsibility, desperate people reach for robots. And remember that autonomous systems are never autonomous... www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
cambridge.org
Human–machine autonomies (Chapter 4) - Autonomous Weapons Systems
Autonomous Weapons Systems - August 2016
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Markus Wulfmeier @mwulfmeier.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
#ReinforcementLearning (Barto&Sutton) wins the Turing! Wonderful recognition for two personal heroes of mine as well as for the whole field! www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/t...
nytimes.com
Turing Award Goes to A.I. Pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton
Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton developed reinforcement learning, a technique vital to chatbots like ChatGPT.
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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Yup. But even complete knowledge of every conceivable microscopic detail down to the quantum level wouldn't tell us "how the brain works". This is one of the lessons of the research on artificial neural networks: we know all parameters already, but understanding still eludes us. 🧵
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