A world model inside the brain Inside an outline of a brain: the words WORLD MODEL at the top, beneath them three parts — causal knowledge about the self and the world (transition priors) and intrinsic goals — which feed down into three task representations drawn as small state-transition diagrams. Each part can be clicked for an explanation. world model++−−−−

Using world models to explain human variability and psychopathology

Our lab uses computational models to explain human learning, planning and how they are altered in psychopathology. Located in Bar-Ilan’s brain center, we’re investigating how trait anxiety biases planning content, meta-control, and efficiency. To do so we use online tasks, advanced virtual reality, eye-tracking, and MEG.

Our recent papers show that people adaptively decide when and how to plan, that worry biases how actions learned under threat generalize, and that repetitive negative thinking can be understood through reinforcement learning. Building on our account of altered planning in anxiety, our world-model theory of trait anxiety now guides the lab: we treat anxiety as a property of a person’s world model, their beliefs about threat, control and the self, and design personalized tasks to measure how those beliefs shape learning and planning.