Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Simon Ciranka

@simyciri.bsky.social

180 followers 330 following 17 posts

Researcher - @arc_mpib; in between in Paris @InstitutNicod What’s going on with those adolescents? What is that „Risk-taking“ everyone keeps talking about? And how do people adapt to poverty?

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 9d

😍 Our latest is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com. 🤩 We show with Bayesian modelling and experimental manipulation of uncertainty that developmental differences in social influence depend on differences in the internal uncertainty people have about their choice
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence - Communications Psychology

Adolescents’ choices are influenced by others. A social risky choice experiment and Bayesian modelling reveal that age differences in internal uncertainty, being unsure how to choose, relate to differences in susceptibility to social influence.

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 6d

If you’re in London next week, why not swing by?

London Judgement and Decision Making seminar series @ljdm.bsky.social · 6d

Hello everyone! Along with our first post here on Bluesky, we look forward to the new academic year, hosting our first #LJDM2025 session next week with Dr Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social. For more info and to keep updated, check our website!

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

London Judgement and Decision Making seminar series @ljdm.bsky.social · 6d

Hello everyone! Along with our first post here on Bluesky, we look forward to the new academic year, hosting our first #LJDM2025 session next week with Dr Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social. For more info and to keep updated, check our website!

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 9d

... does this now mean that young people are even LESS uncertainty tolerant, because they listen more to what others say? We have opinions :) Get in touch! Happy to hear yours!

Also, big shoutout of course to @connectedmindslab.bsky.social 🤗

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 9d

It also means that notions of uncertainty tolerance require additional explanation. It may be that younger people feel unsure about what to choose, which masks as an increased propensity for risky choice at first glance. But at the same time they use social info more, reducing their uncertainty 🤺

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 9d

This internal uncertainty explains age differences in social influence in our experiment. We manipulated social signals by showing the choices of previous participants to ours. The more uncertain our participants were, the more likely they were to follow others. 🌈 This was true irrespective of age.🌈

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 9d

Bayesian modelling reveals that younger participants' choices were characterized by greater uncertainty about the utility of choice options, which was distinct from the increased randomness of participants' choices that is usually shown in higher softmax-temperature in younger participants 🤔

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 9d

We hope to bring more clarity to the notion of uncertainty tolerance among youth 😶‍🌫️. Asking for decisions from description or experience, where uncertainty is low and high, respectively, we demonstrate that adolescents indeed make more risky decisions than adults when uncertainty is high vs low.

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 9d

😍 Our latest is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com. 🤩 We show with Bayesian modelling and experimental manipulation of uncertainty that developmental differences in social influence depend on differences in the internal uncertainty people have about their choice
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence - Communications Psychology

Adolescents’ choices are influenced by others. A social risky choice experiment and Bayesian modelling reveal that age differences in internal uncertainty, being unsure how to choose, relate to differences in susceptibility to social influence.

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · 18d

Did you manage to steal it?

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Marco K Wittmann @mkwittmann.bsky.social · Aug 7

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢

🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method.

Please RT

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Lennart Wittkuhn @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social · Aug 24

Very glad to finally share our paper on replay and successor representation learning! ✨

Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · Aug 22

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social

#compneuro #neuroskyence

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS

Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Tobias Hauser @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social · Jul 24

We are hiring for several research positions for this grant, starting early next year. Please reach out if you're interested!
More details on the jobs here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Kiri Kuroda @kirikuroda.bsky.social · Jul 16

"Individual differences in speed–accuracy trade-off influence social decision-making in dyads"

🚨Our paper has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

w/ Alan Tump @alantump.bsky.social, Ralf Kurvers @ralfkurvers.bsky.social

@royalsocietypublishing.org

1/ 🧵👇

Abstract: Speed–accuracy trade-offs are a fundamental aspect of decision-making, requiring individuals to balance collecting more information against making faster decisions. Although speed–accuracy trade-offs have been studied at the individual level, their role in human decision-making in social settings remains poorly understood—even though faster, and possibly more error-prone, decisions often have more social influence than slower decisions. We examined how individual differences in speed–accuracy trade-off preferences shape decision-making in pairs, using an interactive online experiment and drift–diffusion modelling. Participants first performed a perceptual task alone, allowing us to estimate their individual drift rates and decision thresholds, the key cognitive determinants of speed–accuracy trade-off preferences. They then performed the task in pairs, sharing decisions in real-time. Pair accuracy depended on the faster (and thus more error-prone) member, and not on the slower (but more accurate) member. Social decisions were not worse than individual ones because faster members increased their thresholds in the social condition and became more accurate, while slower members incorporated less social information. These findings show that individuals adjusted their social information use to the speed–accuracy trade-off preferences of their partners, highlighting the importance of such individual differences for understanding social behaviour.

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Charley Wu | hiring PhDs/Postdocs @thecharleywu.bsky.social · Jul 8

The deadline has been extended until July 16th!

👉 PhDs: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Björn Lindström @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social · Jun 26

💥New postdoc position! 💥

Join us to explore how people learn from each other—and how that drives cultural evolution.

Run experiments, build computational models & collaborate across Europe w. @lucasmolleman.bsky.social
📍 Stockholm
More info: shorturl.at/CY4wk

Postdoctoral Researcher in psychology/cognitive science with focus on social learning and cultural evolution

Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? The Mechanisms of Social Behavior lab at the Karolinska Institutet (PI: Björn Lindström) in Stockholm, Sweden is seeking a highly qualified

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · Jun 26

Yay; andrea @andgr.bsky.social is here now too 🚀 :)

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · Jun 25

This was deliberate, because how often do we really see exactly what rewards others experience 🤷

But I wonder if the "surrogate" and joint social-nonsocial, probabilistic rewards are the same thing for the mind and shaping behaviour... 🤨

Anyway; exciting stuff 🚀

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · Jun 25

[...] In every trial, there were 63 alternatives to copying, and the rewards of demonstrators were invisible to our participants, so we needed this surrogate reward.[...]

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · Jun 25

[...] the policy biasing approach that was suggested here: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
We could not model social and nonsocial learning jointly, because the personal rewards were so salient in our task and learning about demonstrators related to the demonstrators' behaviour history only [...]

The actions of others act as a pseudo-reward to drive imitation in the context of social reinforcement learning

This study investigates imitation from a computational perspective; three experiments show that, in the context of reinforcement learning, imitation operates via a durable modification of the learner'...

journals.plos.org

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · Jun 25

Uh, thank you for sharing this 😊!
I like this feature-learning approach a lot; it seems so elegant and resonates with us in moving away from "greedy" social-copy heuristics, as social learning is just more dynamic than such models can portray. Our experiment required us to adopt [...]

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · Jun 25

🤩IT'S A PREPRINT 😍
Adolescents' social sensitivity isn't a bad thing—it's adaptive! In our new study, led by amazing Andrea Gradassi @connectedmindslab.bsky.social, we show that teens learned to copy successful peers faster than adults in a new multiplayer exploration task.
osf.io/preprints/os...

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Charley Wu | hiring PhDs/Postdocs @thecharleywu.bsky.social · Jun 11

🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀
I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales
👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....

Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social · May 19

Are you in Oxford / London this week? Paris beginning of next? Let’s catch up!

You can also see what my latest work is about without catching up :)

mpc-comppsych.bsky.social @mpc-comppsych.bsky.social · May 19

🚨This Thursday Computational Psychiatry seminar at the MPC is given by Dr. Simon Ciranka @simyciri.bsky.social‬
DM @yanivabir.bsky.social (Th 22nd May, 2.00 pm UK time)
#compsy #compneuro @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Dr Lucy Foulkes @lucyfoulkes.bsky.social · Oct 3

Romanticisation of mental health problems in adolescence: what's the deal with that?

🌟 NEW PREPRINT by Awa Ndour and me 🌟

(Romanticise = to portray something as more desirable or positive than it really is)

Brief summary below (🧵)

osf.io/preprints/os...

#PsychSciSky
#DevPsychSky
#ClinPsychSky

Romanticisation is the perception and portrayal of a phenomenon as more attractive, interesting, cool, profound or desirable than it really is. There are concerns that mental health problems are increasingly romanticised, particularly among adolescents, but there is limited research on this topic. This narrative review investigated: (1) what romanticisation is in the context of adolescent mental health problems, (2) why adolescents might romanticise mental health problems, (3) the implications of romanticising mental health problems in adolescence, and (4) what interventions might reduce this phenomenon. Sixty-one publications were reviewed, including qualitative and quantitative analyses, cross-sectional and longitudinal self-report studies and conceptual reviews. Most investigated romanticisation of mental health problems online. Identity formation, popular media influences and peer influences arose as potential explanatory factors. Negative outcomes to romanticisation were indicated

Reposted by Simon Ciranka

Anna Thoma @annaithoma.bsky.social · Apr 10

1/n 🆕📄: How do children learn to adapt to different environments when making repeated choices? And what do cognitive immaturity and probability matching have to do with it? Our new article explores how kids & adults differ in probability learning across statistical task structures: mpib.berlin/R3RFy

psycnet.apa.org