Lenard Dome
Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Tübingen
lenarddome [at] gmail [dot] com
I am a computational cognitive scientist at the University of Tübingen. My research develops and evaluates process models of learning, generalisation, and decision-making, with a central commitment to model adequacy: whether models capture the right mechanisms, not merely the right outcomes. Much of my work approaches this through when intelligent systems fail — irrational generalisation across supervised and unsupervised task structures, and the computational principles that persist across radically different learning conditions (10.48550/arXiv.2608.06149). Failures constrain the space of admissible mechanisms for biological intelligence far more sharply than successes do, since many mechanisms produce correct behaviour but only a few produce the right error under the right conditions. I am increasingly interested in extending this to any learning system, where the same logic applies: recent work of mine locates an instability in attention-learning architectures (used for theorising about human learning) and develops a general architectural change that fixes it — a result about a class of neural network architectures, derived rather than observed (10.48550/arXiv.2609.08615). Analysing learning dynamics in tractable models this way seems to me the most promising route to formal accounts that hold for learning in minds and machines alike.

Publications


    2. Dome, L. (2026). Why Shared Attention Vectors Fail: A Case for Outcome-Indexed Tuning. ArXiv., arXiv:2609.08615. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08615
    4. Dome, L., & Wills, A. J. (2026). Errorless Irrationality: A Unified Computational Account of the Inverse Base-Rate Effect across Predictive, Observational, and Unsupervised Procedures. ArXiv., arXiv:2608.06149. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.06149
    6. Marzuki, A. A., Kosina, L. A., Dome, L., Hewitt, S. R. C., & Hauser, T. U. (2026). Drops in Confidence Precede Symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Nature Communications., 17(1), 8333. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76671-5
    8. Dome, L., Moses-Payne, M., Skvortsova, V., & Hauser, T. U. (2026). Age-related shifts in metacognition are driven by converging confidence for correct and error judgments across the lifespan. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ugb9s_v1
    10. Dome, L., Hezemans, F. H., Kadri, K., Wagner, B. J., Webb, A., & Hauser, T. U. (2026). cpm: A Python Library for Theory-Driven Modelling in Computational Psychiatry. PLOS Computational Biology., 22(7), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014481
    12. Schlegelmilch, R., & Dome, L. (2026). Snake oil or Panacea? How to Misuse AI in Scientific Inquiries of the Human Mind. Behavioral Sciences., 16(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16020219
    14. Dome, L., & Wills, A. J. (2025). g-Distance: On the Comparison of Model and Human Heterogeneity. Psychological Review, 132(3), 632–655. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000550
    16. Dome, L., & Wills, A. J. (2025). Better generalization through distraction? Concurrent load reduces the size of the inverse base-rate effect. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02661-1
    18. Dome, L., & Wills, A. J. (2023). Errorless irrationality: removing error-driven components from the inverse base-rate effect paradigm. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society., 45(45), 237–243. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/936bj
    20. Dome, L., Edmunds, C. E. R., & Wills, A. J. (2021). SUSTAIN captures category learning, recognition, and hippocampal activation in a unidimensional vs information-integration task. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society., 43, 3013–3019. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r98q3dr
    22. Spicer, S. G., Wills, A. J., Jones, P. M., Mitchell, C. J., & Dome, L. (2021). Representing uncertainty in the Rescorla-Wagner model: blocking, the redundancy effect, and outcome base rate. Open Journal of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.46221/ojepn.2021.66233
    24. Wimmer, M. C., Dome, L., Hancock, P. J. B., & Wennekers, T. (2019). Is the Letter Cancellation Task a Suitable Index of Ego Depletion? Social Psychology, 345–354. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000393
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