Thank you! Yes, in general participants who behaved non-randomly in the strategic tasks show many of the typical biases in randomization (e.g., over-alternation) and were thus well-captured by a normal model of random behavior.

Together, these results suggest that human randomization ability is much stronger than previously acknowledged, as long as it’s tested in the right contexts! This is just one piece of a larger set of ideas we’ve been exploring recently on random behavior; more to come!

In three additional studies, we probed this process even more, showing that participants flexibly (and optimally) incorporated information about the reward structure and/or their opponent's knowledge state into their behavior.

In other words, the presence of a strategic opponent pushed people to produce very strong random behavior — in many cases, indistinguishable from uniform randomness. This is surprising, and contrary to what we might expect given the persistent failures in human randomization!

Across three studies, we found evidence for a 'strategic gradient' in randomization: In the game with a live opponent, behavior was near-random; in a closely matched game against a computer opponent, random behavior worsened; and in the non-strategic task (‘be random’), behavior worsened further.

To examine this possibility, we built a custom, online game of Battleship on a 3x3 grid. Then, we compared behavior in the ‘standard’ context (e.g. ‘be random’) to behavior in a live, dyadic game with another opponent where randomness was instrumental.

Here, we asked: Are people bad randomizers in general, or only in some contexts? Most experiments simply order participants to produce (say) random sequences of numbers. This looks nothing like how we use randomness in our daily lives, so maybe we’ve been inadvertently setting people up to fail.

Randomness underlies many key aspects of the world and of our minds, from anti-coordination to decision-making. Yet when we try to generate random sequences, we fall prey to several biases (e.g., over-alternation). This is quite puzzling; why are we so bad at this very important thing?

After years of analyzing thousands of drawings from hundreds of adults and children, I am excited to share my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social )! Using a simple drawing task, we show how topological structure is represented in the mind and its importance in spatial memory.

here at @jhu.edu we believe so strongly in collaboration that @talboger.bsky.social gave his latest internal department talk about work he did outside of my lab, our department, and our university! (lucky you @samiyousif.bsky.social @dorsaamir.bsky.social)