The real world is stochastic, making it difficult to know when planning is worthwhile. Here the authors show that as stochasticity increases, people spend less effort planning and adopt simpler, less ...

Neuroscientific learning theories propose that the brain acquires knowledge by constructing internal world models. Supervised learning, the dominant approach in deep neural networks (DNN), relies on e...

Cognitive maps are essential for navigation, but to what extent are they involved in thinking more broadly? In this opinion article, we examine whethe…

Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...

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...

People often make sequences of decisions to reach a goal. In such situations, when decisions can be undone, people act faster and undo to correct errors. Undoing is driven by both retrospective and pr...

Now hiring a postdoc and a research technician with an interest in neuroeconomics or computational psychiatry.

Schulz et al. show that anhedonia in depression, as measured by a scale often equated with loss of pleasure, reflects reduced anticipation of food rewards rather than impaired enjoyment itself. Linkin...

Paul Sharp treats the brain like a computer to understand why we get stuck in doom loops — and how we can reprogram our mental software

Anxiety is known to distort threat perception, but can it also distort the task representations we use to plan? This study shows that individuals high in trait worry systematically undergeneralize ac...

Clinicians have suggested but not shown how anxiety involves altered planning. Here, I synthesize and extend computational models of planning in a framework that can be used to explain planning biases...