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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · 8d

Interdisciplinary approaches connecting cognitive science and machine learning to study and evaluate metacognition are especially welcome.
sites.google.com/view/metacog...

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · 8d

We are organizing a workshop on Metacognition in Generative AI at @euripsconf.bsky.social in Copenhagen later this year.
Submission deadline for short papers is on October 17th.

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Aug 13

check out our GAC on benchmarks at CCN happening later today!

Erin Grant @eringrant.me · Aug 13

Our #CCN2025 GAC debate w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, Gemma Roig (www.cvai.cs.uni-frankfurt.de), Jacqueline Gottlieb (gottlieblab.com), Klaus Oberauer, @mschrimpf.bsky.social &‬ @brittawestner.bsky.social asks:

📊 What benchmarks are useful for cognitive science? 💭
2025.ccneuro.org/gac

Speakers and organizers of the GAC debate. Time and location of the GAC debate: 5 PM in Room C1.03.

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · Jul 2

What happens when you train AI on psychological experiments? It behaves a lot like a human mind. Here's my story on Centaur, and the debate about what AI has to offer to cognitive science. Gift link nyti.ms/3ZYqXcg 🧪

Scientist Use A.I. To Mimic the Mind, Warts and All

To better understand human cognition, scientists trained a large language model on 10 million psychology experiment questions. It now answers questions much like we do.

nyti.ms

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

Huge thanks to the team and collaborators who made this possible.

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

You can also explore the model via our @hf.co space: huggingface.co/spaces/marce...

Centaur - a Hugging Face Space by marcelbinz

This application generates text based on the input you provide. You can enter a prompt in the text box, and the app will produce a response or continuation. The text should be phrased in natural la...

huggingface.co

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

More information on the project landing page: marcelbinz.github.io/centaur

Centaur

marcelbinz.github.io

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

We also present a case study showing how Centaur can support scientific discovery.
An updated version of this approach is available in our new preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.17661

Automated scientific minimization of regret

We introduce automated scientific minimization of regret (ASMR) -- a framework for automated computational cognitive science. Building on the principles of scientific regret minimization, ASMR leverag...

arxiv.org

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

Centaur can also be adapted to predict secondary measurements like neural activity and response times -- despite never being trained to do so.

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

We find that Centaur generalizes to unseen experiments and accurately predicts human behavior under modified cover stories, problem structures, and even in entirely novel domains.

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

Centaur was trained on Psych-101, a new dataset with trial-by-trial data from 160 psychological experiments, containing over 60,000 participants and 10,000,000 choices.

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

Paper available at www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition - Nature

A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language...

www.nature.com

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jul 2

Excited to see our Centaur project out in @nature.com.
TL;DR: Centaur is a computational model that predicts and simulates human behavior for any experiment described in natural language.

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jun 1

New short-form preprint in which we use Centaur to identify gaps in interpretable cognitive models and revise them accordingly using Qwen3 -- fully automated and without a human-in-the-loop.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.17661

Automated scientific minimization of regret

We introduce automated scientific minimization of regret (ASMR) -- a framework for automated computational cognitive science. Building on the principles of scientific regret minimization, ASMR leverag...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

IICCSSS @iiccsss.bsky.social · May 9

Registration for IICCSSS 2025 in Darmstadt is open! 🥳 Sign up now for a week of exciting talks, hands-on projects and inspiring discussions! www.iiccsss.org/registration/
As always, IICCSSS is free, and open to all students who are excited about computational cognitive science 💡🧠

registration | IICCSSS

International Interdisciplinary Computational Cognitive Science Summer School

www.iiccsss.org

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

Helmholtz Munich @helmholtzmunich.bsky.social · Apr 24

#AIinScience: Ethical & Practical Challenges

🎤Interview with Dr. Marcel Binz, #HelmholtzMunich, on how Large Language Models are transforming scientific methods & the need of reshaping the scientific mindset:

👉 t1p.de/p82vj

@marcelbinz.bsky.social @ericschulz.bsky.social ‬@zeynepakata.bsky.social

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Apr 9

Hi Yifei, sadly we don't have any intern positions available right now (and we are in general constrained to hiring interns who are enrolled at German universities).

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Apr 9

We are looking for two PhD students at our institute in Munich.

Both postions are open-topic, so anything between cognitive science and machine learning is possible.

More information: hcai-munich.com/PhDHCAI.pdf

Feel free to share broadly!

hcai-munich.com

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

Mirko Thalmann @mirkothm.bsky.social · Feb 3

Ever wondered why only some memories 🧠 come easily? Our latest work (osf.io/preprints/ps...) led by S. Haridi, with @ericschulz.bsky.social, shows that targeted memory retrieval speeds up with precise semantic and temporal retrieval cues. Hence, crafting cues can give you instant access to memories⚡

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

lucaschubu.bsky.social @lucaschubu.bsky.social · Feb 25

In previous work we found that VLMs fall short of human visual cognition. To make them better, we fine-tuned them on visual cognition tasks. We find that while this improves performance on the fine-tuning task, it does not lead to models that generalize to other related tasks:

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

Milena Rmus @milenamr7.bsky.social · Feb 26

About a month late posting this, but here's a new project with @ericschulz.bsky.social, @akjagadish.bsky.social, @marvinmathony.bsky.social and Tobias Ludwig

We are using LLMs to propose cognitive models in learning and decision making data. Presenting this work at RLDM!

arxiv.org/abs/2502.00879

Towards Automation of Cognitive Modeling 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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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Feb 7

The German Cognitive Science Society is organizing a PhD symposium in Tuebingen in April.
If you are a PhD student in the vicinity, you should definetely register (by February 28th) -- it will be fun!

cogsciprag.github.io/context-in-c...

Participate

Website for CogSci PhD symposium in Tübingen in 2025 on the topic “Understanding context in cognition”, funded by the German Cognitive Science society

cogsciprag.github.io

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

Eric Schulz @ericschulz.bsky.social · Jan 29

In our latest article, published in @pnas.org and led by @marcelbinz.bsky.social and Stephan Alaniz, we got together four diverse groups of scientists to reflect on how LLMs should affect science. From treating them like co-authors to using other tools instead, many interesting arguments emerged.

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Marcel Binz @marcelbinz.bsky.social · Jan 27

We are currently building the largest, cross-domain data set of human behavior as part of an open collaborative project. Contributions of any form are welcome, but especially experiments with meta-data from developmental, cross-cultural, or clinical studies.

More details: github.com/marcelbinz/P...

GitHub - marcelbinz/Psych-201

Contribute to marcelbinz/Psych-201 development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Reposted by Marcel Binz

Eric Schulz @ericschulz.bsky.social · Jan 15

Have we built machines that learn and think like people?
In our new paper, we find that vision large language models still fall short when it comes to cognitive abilities in the domains of causal reasoning, intuitive physics, and theory of mind.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Visual cognition in multimodal large language models - Nature Machine Intelligence

Modern vision-based language models face challenges with complex physical interactions, causal reasoning and intuitive psychology. Schulze Buschoff and colleagues demonstrate that while some models ex...

www.nature.com

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