Education

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in investigating how people use AI tools through a Cognitive Science lens, placing my work at the intersection of Computational Cognitive Science and Human-Computer Interaction. In recent projects, I have been leveraging Bayesian cognitive models to understand how people weigh up the attributes of these novel systems, and learn to navigate their trade-offs. By committing to formal, mechanistic models of human behavior, my research aims to advance human-centric AI in a manner that both improves our theoretical understanding of cognition, while also offering practical avenues to address real-world problems.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed

  • Mayer, L. W., Karny, S., Ayoub, J., Song, M., Tian, D., Moradi-Pari, E., & Steyvers, M. (2026). Human–AI collaboration: trade-offs between performance and preferences. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 11(1), 18.

  • Steyvers, M., Tejeda, H., Kumar, A., Belem, C., Karny, S., Hu, X., Mayer, L. W. & Smyth, P. (2025). What large language models know and what people think they know. Nature Machine Intelligence, 7(2), 221-231.

  • Bocheva, D., Hinds, J., Brown, O., & Mayer, L. W. (2025). Examining membership across multiple online communities in the “manosphere”. New Media & Society, 14614448251388648.

  • Mayer, L. W., Bocheva, D., Hinds, J., Brown, O., Piwek, L., & Ellis, D. A. (2025). Optimeet: A computational tool to enhance participant attendance in group research. Behavior Research Methods, 57(10), 289.

Pre-prints

  • Steyvers, M., & Mayer, L. W. (2025). When not to help: planning for lasting human-AI collaboration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01837.

Presentations & Posters

  • Mayer, L. W. (2026). Please Don’t Turn Me Off: Optimizing AI Advice Timing for Human-AI Collaboration. 59th Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology (MathPsych), Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

  • Mayer, L. W. (2026). When to shut up: Using deliberately annoying AI assistance to enhance human-AI collaboration. Edwards Bayesian Research Conference, California State University Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, USA.

  • Mayer, L. W. (2025). Walking the line: Balancing AI advice and user frustration for robust human-AI complementarity. NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

  • Steyvers, M., & Mayer, L. W. (2025). A Cognitive Framework for Timely AI Communication. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 47).

  • Karny, S., Mayer, L.W., Ayoub, J., Song, M., Su, H., Tian, D., Moradi-Pari, E., & Steyvers, M. (2024). Learning with AI Assistance: A Path to Better Task Performance or Dependence? Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference.

Research Experience

Awards & Honors

  • Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences Summer Fellowship (2026) - 10.000$
  • Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences 2026 Conference Support Award - 1.500$
  • Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences 2025 Conference Support Award - 1.500$
  • Best Overall Score in Behavioral and Data Science (2022)
  • Peter McEwan Prize for the Best Single Honors Psychology Student (2021)
  • Alan Baddeley Prize for the Best Psychology Dissertation (2021)
  • My Stirling Award GOLD (2021) in recognition of an exceptional depth and breadth of extracurricular activities
  • Honorable Mention for Best Placement Student (2021)

Teaching Experience

Professional Service

Peer-Review

  • Nature Communications (1)
  • Psychological Review (1)
  • Judgment and Decision Making (1)

Organizations

  • Cognitive Science Society
  • Society for Judgment and Decision Making
  • Society for Mathematical Psychology

Professional Development

  • Digital Methods Initiative Winter School: The use and misuse of Open Source Intelligence (2023), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, North Holland, The Netherlands
  • International Interdisciplinary Computational Cognitive Science Summer School (2023), University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
  • NeuroMatch Academy Summer School: Deep Learning (2022), NeuroMatch Academy, Los Angeles, California, USA

Skills

References

Available upon request.