Paul Sharp

How does the brain decide which mental strategy to use when inferring others' beliefs?

Excited to (finally!) see my first first-author paper out @natneuro.nature.com

Summary below 🧵 #CogSci #CogNeuro

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! Where we used multiplayer games to track brain activity underlying the sustained intergroup bias. Led by @oritn.bsky.social . "Group-dependent learning and decision neural signals underlie the persistence of intergroup bias" doi.org/10.31234/osf... 👇

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking:

Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods?

(alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

Claude code indeed helps working in-between alarms that missiles are in the sky.

so so horrible. stay safe.

🚨 Hiring in Munich 🇩🇪: 2 open-topic PhD positions in human & machine learning (TVöD E13 80%).
Start ~June 2026 (flexible). Deadline: March 2, 2026.
Apply/info: hcai-munich.com/PhD_Job_Ad.pdf
Reposts appreciated 🙏

Come work with @tsawallis.bsky.social, Frank Jäkel and myself! 3 yr Postdoc on category learning w/ structured, program-like representations. Funded by the www.theadaptivemind.de Excellence Cluster! Deadline is Mar 15th, details 👇 Please share widely 🙏

Where you look next isn’t arbitrary.
In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵

Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

Nice work! I'm curious @vijay-mkn.bsky.social if you had any measures of offline learning - that is, replay of the association in between external learning episodes. A la the argument for proponents of DYNA - we augment real experience with simulated experience when there's natural spacing.

Thanks @hritz.bsky.social - surprisingly difficult even from that fantastic repo to find ones (easily) with ITIs from at least my prior attempts.

hello friends! does anyone know of open data of an RL task (single- mult-armed bandit tasks) that also list (a variable) ITI per trial in humans?

#computationalcognitivescience #computationalpsychiatry

Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception Predictive processing frameworks have emphasized the role of forward prediction as a critical ingredient for learning and perceptual inference. We ant…

"Forward and backward prediction in learning and perception"

@predictivebrain.bsky.social @clarepress.bsky.social

nice to see our work situated within a broader research program on differences between learning & perceptual predictions

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Do people know if you submit to a journal that wants a blinded review if they also then ask you to remove links to your data? There's so many ways to discover someone's identity through open science practices, right? What are people's strategies here to preserve binding?

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

arxiv.org/abs/2601.11432
I want to share an astonishing result. LLMs can "translate" Jabberwocky' texts like 'He dwushed a ghanc zawk” & even and even 'In the BLANK BLANK, BLANK BLANK has BLANK over any BLANK BLANK’s BLANK' This has profound consequence for thinking about.. 1/2

I'm looking to hire a postgraduate research associate in Computational Psychiatry for my new lab at Yale. Please see link below for details & help RT 🙏

postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Spatial contexts with reliable neural representations support reinstatement of subsequently placed objects - Nature Human Behaviour This study shows that spatial contexts with more reliable brain representations better support memory for future experiences within them, revealing how stable neural maps help the brain organize and recall life events.

New study by @xrmasiso.bsky.social et al shows that spatial contexts with more reliable brain representations better support memory for future experiences within them, revealing how stable neural maps help the brain organize and recall life events.

now out in Decision! 🎉 awspntest.apa.org/manuscript/2...

💥NEW PREPRINT💥: I’m excited to share our new work with
@cfcamerer.bsky.social and John O’Doherty!
We investigated how habit and motor automaticity are related across 5 datasets with 1,000+ participants, using a novel task and existing paradigms
(1/X)
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Computational Psychiatry Conference New Haven, USA (July 14-16, 2026)

📣🔥Submit your symposium (30 Jan) and poster (12 Feb) abstracts to the 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference www.cpconf.org

Excited to announce new keynotes: @danisbassett.bsky.social Eyiyemisi Damisah @adredish.bsky.social Guillermo Horga, Frederike Petzschner. See you in New Haven! #CPConf2026

📢 If these questions excite you, we want to hear from you.
We are reviewing applications on a rolling basis.
📧 Please send your CV and a statement of interest to: Paul.sharp@biu.ac.il
(Reposts appreciated! #ComputationalPsychiatry

6️⃣ Modeling Therapy: We are working on building computational models of cognitive reappraisal using Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL). Can we mathematically map how internal reframing changes action selection?

5️⃣ Replay & ADHD: We are applying normative models of neural replay to study the role of rest. Specifically, how does replay benefit learning, and how might these mechanisms differ in ADHD?

4️⃣ Offline Learning: We aren't just looking at behavior during the task. We are studying offline learning to understand how processing during downtime might contribute to the biased learning patterns often seen in anxiety.

3️⃣ Capacity vs. Efficiency: Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) frameworks, we are working on measuring neural resource capacity versus efficiency. We want to distinguish between having the resources and using the optimally efficient policy to deploy them.

2️⃣ Structure Learning: We are building models to understand how humans leverage prior knowledge of task structures. How do we use what we already know to rapidly build a representation of a current task for planning?

1️⃣ The Big Picture: We are kicking off work on a new 5-year, $1M grant. The core mission is to study planning efficiency—specifically, how we compute the future, and how that process breaks down in the context of anxiety.