James Strachan 🏳️‍🌈

We have a new paper out today in Perspectives on Psychological Science! "Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17… Link to preprint and 🧵 in the QT from first author @matcharbonneau1

Our results indicate that LLMs, particularly GPT-4, show impressive performance on standardised tests of Theory of Mind, but that they also show key differences in how they appear to behave 7/7

LLaMA, on the other hand, appeared to show a bias in responding that may explain its superior performance on this one test (6/7)

Our follow-up experiments indicated that GPT's poor performance was driven by an overly conservative stance as it claimed uncertainty despite being able to generate correct answers when probed (5/7)

Very pleased to see this out now Open Access in Nature Human Behaviour We investigated how well different LLMs performed on tests of Theory of Mind and compared their results against human performance (1/7)

GPT-3.5 also performed at or only slightly below human levels on most tests, while LLaMA2-70B performed below human levels The only task where this pattern didn't hold was the faux pas, where GPT models performed significantly worse than humans while LLaMA did better (4/7)

Humans (unsurprisingly) found more complicated tasks more challenging than simpler tasks What was more surprising was how well the LLMs did. Particularly GPT-4, which performed significantly better than humans on 3/5 tests (irony, hinting, Strange Stories, 3/7)

We tested a broad range of Theory of Mind tests, including false belief, irony comprehension, faux pas, hinting, and the Strange Stories We also made sure to test humans and LLMs in as similar a way as possible to ensure a species-fair comparison of their performance (2/7)

Excited to share the first paper out of my PhD, now published @CognitionJourn! The joint outcome of work with David Dignath and Günther Knoblich. sciencedirect.com/science/articl… We find new evidence that co-actors represent joint actions on a group level. WE > ME. Thread: 1/

Very pleased to announce that the first study from my PhD thesis is out now 🥳 with thanks to @ConstableMerryn and all my other wonderful co-authors!

Nature research paper: Synaptic wiring motifs in posterior parietal cortex support decision-making go.nature.com/42UCYj9

I am very excited to share with you the news that our book ‘The Evolution of Techniques: Rigidity and Flexibility in Use, Transmission, and Innovation’ is coming out in exactly 2 months. mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547802/… 1/5

Check out our paper, "Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination" in Perspectives on Psychological Science

And then it hits you...

Fantastic evening tonight seeing Rodrigo y Gabriela (@rodgab) live in Hamburg

The saga we tell here says social world’s important, And memories come from it as resultant But there’s much more to grants than captured in verse, So if this was not clear then come and converse, I tell you in prose what in lyrics I’ve shortened.

For a departmental event I wrote a limerick about my grant. In celebration of the project starting Sept 1, and since otherwise it would from now on just sit in one of my "misc" folders, I release it onto the world instead. come for the cringe, stay for the forced rhymes 👇

@GloucesterQuays @Lindt Thanks, Alia! She had a great day and is looking forward to coming back when she's run out of Lindor ;)

@jamesstrachan @Lindt Hi James, the customer experience manager here, my team and I here today are thrilled that we were able to work with Lindt and make your Granny's day that little bit more special! We hope she had a lovely day out and hopefully we can welcome her back for her next birthday - Alia

Huge thanks to @Lindt and the team at @GloucesterQuays who made my Granny's 100th birthday special with a surprise gift of 100 of her favourite white chocolates 💜

Here she is picking out some additional decoy chocolates to protect her new stash Quote of the Day: "If I'd known being 100 was this fun I'd have done it ten years ago."

Thank you to Carol (in the picture above) and her team at Lindt, and to the ladies on the Customer Service desk who all made my Granny's day