📌 The same Bayesian framework explains information search. Participants flexibly queried new information in ways that match an optimal information-theoretic search model.

📌 A Bayesian model best explains these inferences. Participants’ judgments are best described by a Bayesian model that rationally integrates new evidence with prior expectations about others’ competence.

Main findings:

📌 People can accurately predict what others know from very limited information. From a single observed answer, participants could predict the probability that someone would know another trivia question with striking accuracy!

After seeing an individual’s performance on a trivia question, participants had to either:
- predict the individual’s ability to answer other trivia questions from the same theme, or
- select which information would be most diagnostic for inferring an individual’s competence.

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search

If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

Nice to see our research featured on the eHRAF Academic Quarterly!

I also discovered some interesting papers that I missed :)

Hi! I'm attending #SBDM2025 conference over the next few days. Come find me at Poster #61 if you're interested in computational models of social cognition!

Looking forward to discussing and meeting new people :)

I presented this paper at the Explaining Culture Conference last week, and I couldn't resist creating a new plot specifically for the talk.

It's definitely not a good time management strategy to create new plot for each talk, but it's a lot of fun!

And it works! Participants exposed to high‑insight stimuli wanted to read more riddles & whodunits, and were even more interested in sharing them.

We speculate that the larger effect on sharing is probably because passing on clever content boosts your reputation.

We focus on two popular cultural products: riddles (cross-cultural), and whodunits (Agatha Christie is the best selling author ever).

In 5 studies, we manipulated feelings of insight to test their impact on people's willingness to share and consume these materials.

"What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at midday, and three feet in the evening?"

This riddle is thousands of years old, but why does it stick with us?

In our new paper, we argue that the feeling of insight might explain the lasting success of some cultural products: tinyurl.com/4j756h9a

A few photos of this weekend's hike to Royaumont Abbey, near Paris.

(Accessible super easily with public transport from Paris)

Before, you could see all the components and the associated pre-registrations in the same view, plus the files from the github repo. It's now a maze to find all the important files for peer-review.

A lower rate of publication compared to the PhD also decreases the probability of landing a faculty job:

The pre-print is now available here: osf.io/preprints/os...

New textbook from Griffiths, Chater & Tenenbaum! Just started to read but it's well written and clear.

Highly recommend!

Et comme c'est en open source, y'a une communauté de nerd qui fait des plugins utiles.

Par exemple, j'ai des suggestions grâce à l'IA de mes notes les plus pertinentes pour ce que je suis en train d'écrire (ce que tu vois à droite).