Max Taylor-Davies

Grateful to the CiCL folks for some super interesting discussion!

Most popular decision-making models assume that cognitive processes are static over time. In our new paper in Psych Review, we offer a simple extension to evidence accumulation models that lets researchers account for systematic changes in parameters across time 📈

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

3 papers from @flowersinria team are presented this week at the @alife2025.bsky.social , leveraging curiosity-driven AI to explore complex behaviors in #Lenia

All first authors are attending the conference if you want to discuss with them.

Link to interactive websites, papers and code below:

My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle!

We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate.

It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations.

Spread the words!

"the computational metaphor" in cognitive science is not a metaphor. computational processes are attributed to the mind/brain in the most dead-literal sense. one can disagree with it but (1) it's not as simple as discarding a metaphor and (2) boy is there a lot of data that has to be explained!

An information bottleneck view of social stereotype use Author(s): Taylor-Davies, Max Louis; Quillien, Tadeg | Abstract: For decades, social psychologists have wondered about the cognitive foundations of social stereotype use. Arguments have generally cent...

Paper: escholarship.org/uc/item/86c4...

At #CogSci2025 and curious about resource-rational models of social cognition? Come to Nob Hill A at 11:14 tomorrow to hear me talk about work with @tadegquillien.bsky.social where we use the information bottleneck to study stereotype use and the outgroup homogeneity bias!

Lossy encoding of distributions in judgment under uncertainty People often make judgments about uncertain facts and events, for example ‘Germany will win the world cup’. Judgment under uncertainty is often studie…

Just out in Cognitive Psychology
Lossy encoding of distributions in judgment under uncertainty
By @tadegquillien.bsky.social , me & Chris Lucas

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

We find people's 'best guesses' sneakily encode distribution information that guesser & others can reconstruct later

Our new paper with Max Taylor-Davies introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind.

The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates. 🧵

Very happy that our paper received both the EvoApps best paper and the EvoStar best student paper! Congrats team!!

Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution
arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536