Other highlights of the day included the cockiest slide I’ve made in my life, and my hat being almost the right size

Over the moon to announce that, as of last Friday, I’m officially #PhDone! I’d like to thank everyone who supported me along the way, including, but not limited to, my amazing supervisor @thecharleywu.bsky.social, and all members (past or present) of the HMC lab and the @velezcolab.bsky.social 🎓

Happening today after lunch! Stop by W-213 (conveniently placed at the very entrance of the salon, near fresh air!) to hear about positivity biases across individual and social learning #cogsci2025

We also find that bias isn't as stable as we expected: while there is still a significant positivity bias in individual + rich, we also find a high proportion of unbiased learners. Participants changed their bias between conditions, rather than being consistently positivity-(or negativity-) biased.

Participants were significantly positivity-biased in both individual conditions (matching previous findings), but they were only positivity biased in poor environments for social learning, while we found no significant bias in rich environments (where positivity bias is maladaptive).

We then ran a within-subjects 2x2 design as an online experiment. Each participant completed two armed bandits in rich and poor environments, and while learning socially or individually.

What bias is adaptive depends on what kind of environment you're in: in poor environments (rare rewards), a positivity bias is beneficial, while the opposite is true in rich environments. Our simulations show that this holds regardless of individual or social contexts.

6/7 Participants used social information as an exploration tool: when it was possible to learn from others, they reduced the amount of directed individual exploration they did -- this might be resource-rational, given that exploration has been found to be cognitively costly.

5/7 Participants adjusted how much they relied on social information to the task -- when we lowered social correlations, they stopped using social information altogether.

4/7 Participants treated social information as noisy individual information, following the predictions of our Social Generalization model. They also performed better when they relied on social information, using it to their advantage.

3/7 To investigate how humans handle settings where preferences are non-identical, we ran 3 experiments using the socially correlated bandit -- a task in which social information is helpful, but imitation is not optimal.

How do we integrate social information from others with similar, but distinct, preferences? Find the answer in the first publication of my PhD, now out in PNAS! (pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Or get the quick rundown in the thread below 🧵

Ever had to go through the gruelling process of finding a good restaurant based on Google reviews? 🍝 Come check out my poster today to learn how humans use social information from others with similar, but nonidentical, tastes! #CogSci2024 (P1-LL-178!)

Happy to share that I recently started a research visit at the
@velezcolab.bsky.social - looking forward to collaborating with the experts on collaboration, and to delve back into neuroscience 🥳 🧠

Instead, there are some things everyone looks for in a good restaurant (high ingredient quality, hygiene standards), while others are matters of taste. We formalize this idea into a socially correlated bandit task, where learning from others is good, but imitation isn't optimal. (3/7)