iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Check out Yhonatan's interesting paper on optimism and geopolitical forecasting

000

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

This work was led by Yhonatan Shemesh, with David Leiser as the co-PI: osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

021

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

📢New preprint alert📢 Why do people think war will succeed? We conducted a geopolitical forecasting contest to see how people's motivated cognition affects their predictions concerning geopolitical events for which they have "skin in the game". Link in first comment.

121

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

🚨Preprint alerts between alarms🚨 We have lots of new papers in the pipeline, so using the time in the bomb shelter to do some PR. Here's the first one: Inon is using LLMs to measure content dimension of your social media feed, trying to quantify the emotional harms of your "media diet".

021

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Thanks to all of the great co-authors, Nachshon Meiran, Shaul Shvimmer, Liron Amihai, Yitzhak Yitzhaky, Jonathan Rosenblatt and to @mattansb.bsky.social for lots and lots of help on the statistical analyses

010

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Our new paper led by Rotem Simhon: fancy cameras and algorithms show that people's faces contains information concerning the specific emotions they feel even when human observers can't detect them, and this isn't just about valence\arousal. Read it here: rdcu.be/esh6o

rdcu.be

Beyond Valence and Arousal: Distributed Facial Patterns Linked to Specific Emotions Cannot be Reduced to Core Affect

200

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

10/ 🎉 This work was led by Avi Gamoran with myself and Britt Hadar @britthadar.bsky.social co-PI'ing the project. Read the full paper here: doi.org/10.1037/pspa...

doi.org

APA PsycNet

020

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

9/ 🌐 The additivity of distance shapes how we navigate a world where spatial and social distances increasingly diverge. In the paper, we discuss some implications this has to communication of distant risks, and to our understanding of everyday experience in the modern world.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

8/ ➕ Result #3: Our study revealed a monotonic, additive relationship between distance and abstraction. Proximity on one dimension (e.g., socially) does not undo the abstraction caused by distance on others.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

7/ 🔗 Result #2: CLT’s second premise also received support: Distancing events on one dimension (e.g., spatially) increased their perceived distance on other dimensions (e.g., temporally, socially).

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

6/ 🧠 To objectively measure the degree of distance in texts, we trained a neural network to classify narratives as close or far across spatial, temporal, and social dimensions. This classifier is available to other researchers and can be implemented with minimal coding experience.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

5/ 📈 Result #1: As predicted by CLT, distance increased abstraction. All three dimensions affected abstraction, as shown by both measures: abstract language and episodic details. This confirms that CLT stands on firm ground—a crucial finding given ongoing concerns about replicability in psychology.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

4/ 🔬 To measure abstraction, we used two complementary approaches: Quantifying the use of concrete vs. abstract words in participants’ stories and a neural network trained to assess the degree of episodic vs. semantic details.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

3/ ✍️ In this preregistered study with 1,001 participants, people thought of people, places, and times they deem close or far. They wrote short stories about these events, with distance factorially manipulated across spatial, temporal, and social dimensions to examine its effects on abstraction.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

2/ 🌍 Imagine feeling close to someone miles away or disconnected from an event happening next door. Social distance doesn’t always align with physical space or time. Our study dives into such paradoxes: How do dimensions of distance—spatial, temporal, and social—shape our thoughts and memories?

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

1/ 🚨 Out in JPSP, "Thinking in 3D: A Multidimensional Mapping of the Effects of Distance on Abstraction" asks: How robust is the evidence for Construal Level Theory (CLT)? Are spatial, temporal, and social distances equally influential? How do these dimensions of distance interact? 1/n

163

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Multivariate Bayesian analysis revealed confirmed that that most of the DMN is utilized in both imagination and memory; the left ventral Precuneus displayed different patterns for imagination and memory of the same event.

110

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Participants first read and imagined sentences describing different stages of their upcoming experience. After the jump, they revisited these sentences—but this time, recalling their real experiences during each part.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

We scanned participants before and after they skydive for the first time. This design captures brain activity tied to both imagination and memory around a truly novel, real-world experience.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Past research often asked people to imagine future events that they have done before, which could have inflated estimates of similarity, so we wanted participants to imagine things they really haven't done before: jump off a plane.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

We wanted to use state-of-the-art methods to examine the degree to which patterns of neural activity are similar in imagination and memory.

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Past research has shown that the default mode network supports both memory and imagination. If this is the case, how do we differentiate between the two?

100

Michael Gilead @michaelgilead.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

🚨Thrilled to share our new study, led By Dr. Inon Raz, in Cerebral Cortex🚨: "The Future, Before, and After". The ability to imagine things we haven’t done before is one of the hallmarks of human cognition. How do we do it?

1155