28 January 2026: Two kinds of uncertainty, two kinds of learning failure

Payam Piray
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

University of Southern California

Adaptive learning requires distinguishing two causes of uncertainty, moment-to-moment stochasticity in observations and environmental volatility, that demand opposite adjustments to learning rate. Yet both increase experienced noise, making their dissociation computationally difficult and prone to systematic errors. I will present a computational framework, behavioral paradigm, and large-scale data investigating how humans dissociate these two sources of noise, and how this process gives rise to two kinds of learning failure.

View a recording of this session here.