[AI Seminar Series] REMINDER: Seminar by Prof. Ian Ballard, tomorrow Friday January 23rd, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[Vassilis Tsotras]

Reminder about the AI Seminar tomorrow noon in the MRB Seminar room. Please
use the link below to register if you plan to attend.

V. Tsotras
----------------------------------------

On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 7:42 AM Vassilis Tsotras <vassilis.tsotras at ucr.edu>
wrote:

> The next AI Seminar will be on Friday January 23rd, 12-1pm, in the MRB
> Seminar Room (1st floor).
>
> *** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****
>
> To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
> https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-seminar-series-tickets-1980792449538.
>
> The talk will be given by *Prof. Ian Ballard*, Department of Psychology,
> UCR
>
> TITLE: Large Language Models reproduce human framing effects in inter
> temporal choice
>
> ABSTRACT:
> Humans are highly susceptible to framing manipulations in intertemporal
> decision making—choices that involve tradeoffs between immediate and
> delayed rewards. Classic biases such as the magnitude effect, in which
> larger reward amounts increase patience, have been attributed to
> self-control, reward system activation, and other cognitive mechanisms.
> Here, we show that large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar
> sensitivities to decision framing, including the magnitude, sign, and
> hidden-zero effects. Unlike humans, LLMs discount delayed rewards
> exponentially rather than hyperbolically and do not exhibit a decimal
> effect, suggesting that their behavior is not merely inherited from
> descriptions of decision-making phenomena in their training data.
>
> Analysis of LLM embedding spaces, which encode semantic knowledge,
> revealed that large monetary amounts are represented more closely to words
> related to delay and the future. This suggests that framing biases in LLMs
> arise from semantic proximity of choice options to temporal concepts.
> Together, these findings introduce a conceptual framework in which
> linguistic structure shapes decision-making, raising the possibility that
> human framing effects partly emerge from the organization of choices in
> semantic space.
>
>
> Bio:
> Ian Ballard is an Assistant Professor at the University of California,
> Riverside. He is affiliated with the Cognitive and Cognitive Neuroscience
> area of the Psychology Department and the UCR Neuroscience Graduate
> Program. He uses an integrative approach in which insights from statistical
> learning, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology inspire novel experimental
> probes of the relationship between goals and learning. His research has
> been funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of
> Health.
>
> ------------------------------------
> Sponsored by the RAISE at UCR Institute, the AI Seminar Series presents
> speakers working on cutting edge Foundational AI or applying AI in their
> research. The goal of these seminars is to inform the UCR community about
> current trends in AI research and promote collaborations between faculty
> in this emerging field. These seminars are open to interested faculty and
> graduate/undergraduate students. Please forward this email to other
> colleagues or students in your lab that may be interested. After the
> seminar a discussion will follow for questions, open problems, ideas for
> possible collaborations etc.
>
> Sincerely,
> Vassilis Tsotras
> Professor, CSE Department
> co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
>
> Amit Roy-Chowdhury
> Professor, ECE Department
> co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
>
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