Gökhan Aydogan

War Trauma Impairs Prenatal Brain Development: Evidence from Genetically-Informed Brain Imaging https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.05.686844v1

War Trauma Impairs Prenatal Brain Development: Evidence from Genetically-Informed Brain Imaging The global rise in armed conflicts has raised concerns about their long-term consequences. While the immediate mental and physical impacts of war are well documented, the effects on unborn children of...

Takeaway: the costs of conflict extend far beyond the battlefield and across the lifespan. Read the paper ⤵️ 📄🔗
and leave comments
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 Paper alert 👇
Does war trauma leave a lasting imprint on civilians’ brains🧠?

We analyzed ~40k MRIs in the #UKBiobank, including ~6k of people born during WWII. Those exposed to close bombings in-utero show differences in brain structure, even decades later.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

👇Check out our new pre-print 👇

War Trauma Impairs Prenatal Brain Development: Evidence from Genetically-Informed Brain Imaging https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.05.686844v1

Acute stress reduces risk-aversion by changing magnitude perception Stress is thought to impair financial decision-making by influencing the willingness to take risks. This effect is commonly attributed to stress-related changes in affective evaluation of rewards and ...

Many real-world decisions happen under stress. If stress inflates perceived payoffs, we need better guardrails for high-stakes choices.
Read the preprint + tell us what you think: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#Neuroeconomics #Stress #Risk #fMRI #Bayesian

Acute stress reduces risk-aversion by changing magnitude perception Stress is thought to impair financial decision-making by influencing the willingness to take risks. This effect is commonly attributed to stress-related changes in affective evaluation of rewards and ...

1/ 🚨 New preprint: Acute stress doesn’t just change feelings—it warps how big payoffs look, pushing people to be more risk-seeking than usual.
👉 “Acute stress reduces risk-aversion by changing magnitude perception.” doi.org/10.1101/2025...

@gillesdehollander.bsky.social @saurabhbedi.bsky.social

📢 New preprint 📢
(with Daniil Luzyanin)

We use a new task to distinguish between the instantaneous and instrumental (goal-oriented) value of the same choice option in the brain using fMRI: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

👉Great work by my colleagues at @econ.uzh.ch

Probability weighting arises from boundary repulsions of cognitive noise In both risky choice and perception, people overweight small and underweight large probabilities. While prospect theory models this with a probability weighting function, and Bayesian noisy coding mod...

📢 Preprint out! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... What gives rise to probability weighting, a cornerstone of Prospect Theory?
We show it comes from the natural boundedness of probabilities + cognitive noise. Adding boundaries adds multiple distortions, across risky choice & perception.

For more, check out our preprint at osf.io/preprints/ps...
And special shout out to my co-authors who made this possible📣📷<🙏👏

@niklasbuergi.bsky.social @arkadykonovalov.bsky.social and Christian C. Ruff
#neuroeconomics
(5/5)

Finally, using machine learning, we've decoded adaptive mentalization with remarkable accuracy (r ~ .8), and thus are able to predict out-of-sample one's belief update with high precision. 🔎🧠 (4/5)

We term this behavior adaptive #mentalization , which is predominantly encoded within the social brain network. This underscores the pivotal role of areas such as the TPJ in updating beliefs about others' strategies. #neuroeconomics (3/5)

In repeated ✊🖐️✌️-like games, players don't rigidly stick to a single level of thinking (e.g., 'I think that you think' etc.), but dynamically adjust to their opponent's level.
Our new Bayesian model CHASE captures and characterizes this adaptive behavior! #gametheory
(2/5)

🤔How do humans anticipate an opponent's moves in strategic games?

Excited to share our latest work on #mentalization in strategic games.
After years of work, we've empirically validated our new model, behaviorally (N~500) and neurally (N~100) 🧠 a 🧵 (1/5)