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Reposted by Kozzy Voudouris

Franziska Brändle @frabraendle.bsky.social · 6d

What influences whether people have fun with a task?

Our paper “Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations and success influence enjoyment in video games” with @thecharleywu.bsky.social and @ericschulz.bsky.social now in Scientific Reports!

rdcu.be/eI069

Paper summary below 1/4

Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games

Scientific Reports - Leveling up fun: learning progress, expectations, and success influence enjoyment in video games

rdcu.be

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Reposted by Kozzy Voudouris

Milena Rmus @milenamr7.bsky.social · 16d

Happy to announce our paper got accepted to #NeurIPS!
@akjagadish.bsky.social @marvinmathony.bsky.social @ericschulz.bsky.social & Tobi Ludwig

arxiv.org/abs/2502.00879

Generating Computational Cognitive Models using Large Language Models

Computational cognitive models, which formalize theories of cognition, enable researchers to quantify cognitive processes and arbitrate between competing theories by fitting models to behavioral data....

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Kozzy Voudouris

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 20d

Excited for this paper to be out, literal years of hard work by Kozzy. Excitingly, my first last author paper!

This work came from joining the Kinds of Intelligence group at Cambridge and being given time by @martahalina.bsky.social to explore and cross disciplines. Hard work but very fun! 🧪 🤖🧠

Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

We find that recurrence confers a significant advantage for learning more complex grammars, but lamination does not.

This work would not have been possible without Matishalin Patel, Colin Klein, Marta Halina, and Andrew Barron. You can check out our preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.13968.

Exploring Major Transitions in the Evolution of Biological Cognition With Artificial Neural Networks

Transitional accounts of evolution emphasise a few changes that shape what is evolvable, with dramatic consequences for derived lineages. More recently it has been proposed that cognition might also h...

arxiv.org

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

@matishalin.bsky.social @martahalina.bsky.social

Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

We find that recurrence confers a significant advantage for learning more complex grammars, but lamination does not.

This work would not have been possible without Matishalin Patel, Colin Klein, Marta Halina, and Andrew Barron. You can check out our preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.13968.

Exploring Major Transitions in the Evolution of Biological Cognition With Artificial Neural Networks

Transitional accounts of evolution emphasise a few changes that shape what is evolvable, with dramatic consequences for derived lineages. More recently it has been proposed that cognition might also h...

arxiv.org

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

2) The evolution of lamination, in which information is processed by independent sub-components.

We test these networks on artificial grammar learning tasks, for which the complexity of the problem can be precisely stated.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

We focus on two transitions

1) The evolution of recurrent systems, in which information feeds back to earlier parts of the network.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

In a new preprint, we explore this hypothesis with a computational approach. By systematically evolving neural nets with different structures, we measure whether key structural transitions improve performance on more complex problems, while controlling for the resources available to the network.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

The arrangement of neurons is adjusted, using similar resources but opening up the possibility for more complex behaviour. This helps to explain the huge diversity of cognition we see across our planet: from nematodes 🪱 and box jellyfish 🪼 , to bees 🐝 , octopus 🐙 , chimpanzees 🐵 , and us 🙋 .

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

What if the same is true for the evolution of cognition?

It has recently been argued that the evolution of brains across the animal kingdom can be characterised in terms of just a few major structural changes.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

A prominent idea in biology tells us that evolution is not always incremental, but often involves a few important structural changes that open up phylogenetic possibility.

Think: single cells ➡️ multicellular life. Solitary individuals ➡️ eusocial colonies.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 3

That's certainly a hard part too, I can't deny that!

Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

Thanks @dmoralesp.bsky.social, I'm interested to hear your thoughts!

Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

You can check out the published article here (doi.org/10.1007/s105...) and a pre-print here (philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26165/).

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

This gives rise to an apparent, but ineffable, distinction between hypotheses. Crucially, this apparent distinction does not necessarily imply a distinction at the level of behavioural processes.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

For decades, this distinction has been tacitly assumed but impossible to accurately define. I argue that the apparent distinction is actually an artefact of widespread analogical reasoning based on theories in human psychology and classic behaviourist associative learning theory.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

I suggest that the widespread use of analogies explains away one of the most controversial debates in this field: whether associative learning and cognition are distinct behavioural processes.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

In my latest thriller, published today in Biology and Philosophy, I argue that one useful hypothesis generation strategy in comparative psychology is analogical reasoning.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

The hypothesis space is so large and it requires us to eschew our human-centred expectations about behaviour and cognition.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Sep 2

Doing cognitive science on non-human systems like animals or artificial intelligence, brings inherent challenges. One of them is generating plausible alternative explanations for behaviour that can be tested empirically.

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Reposted by Kozzy Voudouris

lucaschubu.bsky.social @lucaschubu.bsky.social · Jun 2

Excited to say our paper got accepted to ICML! We added new findings including this: models fine-tuned on a visual counterfactual reasoning task do not generalize to the underlying factual physical reasoning task, even with test images matched to the fine-tuning data set.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · May 23

Many thanks to my coauthors @martahalina.bsky.social , @lucycheke.bsky.social, and Ben Farrar for working with me on this project.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · May 23

You can check out the open-access paper here: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · May 23

We found that comparative psychologists have incredibly diverse attitudes to these methodological challenges. This suggests that there is still a lot of work for both psychologists and philosophers of science to do to clarify fundamental debates at the heart of comparative psychology research.

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Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · May 23

First, the apparent distinction between associative learning and cognition, and second, the question of whether some explanations of animal behaviour are simpler than others (often discussed with reference to Morgan's Canon).

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