Very excited to share @landrybulls.bsky.social's 1st lead-author preprint in my lab! Using datasets from MySocialBrain.org we measured people's beliefs about how mental states change in intensity over time, the dimensional structure of those beliefs, and their correlates: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵👇

Excited to share the preprint for my 1st 1st-author manuscript! @markthornton.bsky.social and I show that people hold robust, structured beliefs about how individual mental states unfold in intensity over time. We find that these beliefs are reflected in other domains of mental state understanding.

condemnations of political violence are well taken but it does feel as if some prominent political commentators are of the view that violence isn’t a part of the history of American politics and that is very much not true.

🚨 New paper alert! (slightly belated) We (with @joshcjackson.bsky.social) suggest that complex technologies, as they need several (often many) people to use them, require innovations that distribute cognition to help regulate cognitive load and coordinate. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Today, SCRAP Lab returned (right) to the Path of Life Garden in Windsor, VT - the site of our first in-person get-together as a lab 5 years ago (left) - to welcome our newest member, graduate student @gabefajardo.bsky.social!

The psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

PsyArXiv is now down to only ~40% of the backlog we started with, thanks to our amazing moderators 🎉 To all mods: thank you so much for your hard work! Did one of your preprints get approved recently? Help us show our thanks by liking and sharing this post :) #PsyArXiv #PsychSciSky

After 5 years, I finally carved out time to turn this blog post on FDR (markallenthornton.com/blog/fdr-pro...) into a manuscript. The preprint features a much broader range of simulations showing how FDR promotes confounds, and how this effect compounds with publication bias: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that! Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

So excited to share that my first first-author paper is out in @commspsychol.nature.com 🎉 In a mini-meta analysis of seven studies, we looked at whether loneliness is related to altered expectations of one’s own and others' emotion transitions. www.nature.com/articles/s44... (1/4)

I haven't been doing much astrophotography for the last year or so because the deck I use for it had become unsafe. But it's repaired now, so I'm back at it! I think this is the best shot of Andromeda that I've managed to date!

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

Come be my colleague! The Department of Psychology at Princeton and @princetonneuro.bsky.social‬ are jointly searching for an Assistant Prof in Cog Neuro. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

I've had a coffee plant as a house plant for the last few years, and it finally produced some ripe cherries. I peeled them, fermented the coating off the beans, roasted them, and did a taste test (vs. store bought). The homegrown won (less astringent)! Enjoyed w/ (also) homegrown aronia jam on toast

Preprint⭐ Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online! Links: www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/eAcN7 In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill? Read more below to find out 👇

🤔 How can we study #consciousness between people, at the social level? 🧠✨ New #preprint co-led by Anne Monnier & Lena Adel: “Now is the Time: Operationalizing Generative Neurophenomenology through Interpersonal Methods” 🧵(1/3)

These job ads have now been posted! 🎉 Social/Personality: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05020 Biological Basis of Behavior: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05054 Please spread the word!

New paper from me at Cognition and Emotion! "Deep neural network models of emotion understanding" I discuss how deep nets can be used as cognitive models of emotion perception, prediction, and regulation: doi.org/10.1080/0269... (h/t @ltjaql.bsky.social for the illustrations!)

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning. Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Oops! My categories got scrambled when I was merging data from the new and old wikis. Should have double-checked that. Here's the corrected version - sorry about that, folks!

It look me longer than usual to get to this, in part because of the transition to the new job wiki, which required me to rewrite my scraping code.

In advance of next year's (likely dire) job market, here are the 2024-2025 numbers from the psych job wiki: the overall number of tenure-track job listings in psychology and neuroscience fell slightly, from 860 to 822 (this doesn't include canceled searches, which are often not properly reported).

New paper led by @codydong.bsky.social now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, exploring the relationship between memory-augmented LLMs and human episodic memory – see Cody’s post below for a short thread and a non-paywalled paper link! #NeuroAI doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

🚨 new paper out! Perception of motion and of social interactions are two processes that happen to be localized around the same brain anatomy: lateral occipitotemporal areas. Is motion necessary to see social interactions network? link.springer.com/article/10.1... @cnrs.fr @babylyon.bsky.social

🎉New paper out @Psychological Review on the neuroscience of intergroup contact🎉 Led by the fantastic @margaretrwelte.bsky.social ‬and Jas Cloutier! @apajournals.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social @sansmeeting.bsky.social #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #AcademicSky psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Check out Zaid's open "Podcast" ECoG dataset for natural language comprehension (w/ Hasson Lab). The paper is now out at Scientific Data (nature.com/articles/s41...) and the data are available on OpenNeuro (openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...).

Check out our new work with @xallysie.bsky.social, @erichehman.bsky.social, and my student Ruoying on a tutorial for Representational Similarity Analysis! Thanks for the fun collaboration!!

First paper from my lab out @commspsychol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00275-w Latent factor models are popular for mental representation of people, e.g. warmth & competence But we show in naturalistic contexts, more complex representations are needed: high-dimensional networks

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Groundbreaking work by @martamasilva.bsky.social using intracranial recordings to study event boundaries and event memory, revealing neural mechanisms that we haven't been able to measure with fMRI!

🌟 Want to get more involved in the SANS Community? 🌟 Consider joining one of the SANS working committees! We welcome interest from all levels - from graduate student to emeritus professor! Interested? Fill out the form here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Deadline: July 19, 2025

Next summer I will start as an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I couldn't be more excited! 1/

How do different languages converge on a shared neural substrate for conceptual meaning? Happy to share a new preprint led by Zaid Zada that specifically addresses this question:

Really excited to share our new preprint led by @ahmadsamara.bsky.social with Zaid Zada, @vanderlab.bsky.social, and Uri Hasson titled "Cortical language areas are coupled via a soft hierarchy of model-based linguistic features" doi.org/10.1101/2025...

new preprint - do you use #fnirs to study cognition? do you want to learn how to design better studies? our primer aims to get you started on using #fnirs for real-world #cognitive #neuroscience osf.io/preprints/ps...

Paper in @pnas.org in which @d-melnikoff.bsky.social and I provide evidence for model-based effects on automatic evaluation. This was a super fun “adversarial” collaboration with 0 adversariality. It may have been nice to be right, but getting it right is nearly as nice: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In a TiCS paper, @chujunlin.bsky.social & I propose a high-dimensional model of social impressions. Existing models focus on 2–4 latent dimensions (e.g. trustworthy/warm), but they often fall apart across different contexts, cultures, & perceivers. We need a paradigm shift. shorturl.at/7GD1n (1/8)

How do we make new connections? Ashley Binnquist, Agnieszka Pluta, Bear Goldstein, Rick Dale, @socialbrain.bsky.social and I just posted a new preprint on the neurocognitive processes that support meaningful social connection. 🧠🧠💬💬 [1/8] 🧵

Our new paper is now out in Nature Human Behaviour: The chronospatial revolution in psychology. With Joe Henrich & Jonathan Schulz. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🥳Excited to share that I am joining Columbia July 2025 @columbiauniversity.bsky.social Looking for🚨lab managers🚨postdocs🚨grad students! Pls REPOST🙏 We study⭐️person perception⭐️social cognition using experimental, cross-cultural, & computational methods! App👉shorturl.at/5UVPl More👉shorturl.at/q18GM

How do people teach? 🍎🧑‍🏫 We know theory of mind is important for teaching (eg simulating a learner's mind) but that can take effort 🤔 New work led by @harootonian.bsky.social expands this picture by examining how people also teach with *less effortful heuristics*

I’m excited to share a new paper from the lab. The study led by Xiaowei Gu reveals how the mPFC encodes complex emotional memories, using an internal model to infer emotional associations and memories via projections to the amygdala. a🧵(1/8) rdcu.be/el19t

What motivates people to take action and share info about climate change? We tested 17 psychological interventions in a tournament—Discover the winners in our new paper! Out now in @pnas.org w/ @falklab.bsky.social, @michaelemann.bsky.social, & team. Thread ⤵️ 1/9 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New results! Different anesthetics, same result: unconsciousness by shifting brainwave phase MIT study finds that an easily measurable brain wave shift may be a universal marker of unconsciousness under anesthesia picower.mit.edu/news/differe... #neuroscience

I’m thrilled to share my new paper on impression formation & updating in @natrevpsychol.nature.com! In it, I argue that impression formation is fundamentally a learning process. And as such, theories of impression formation should be based on mechanisms of learning and memory. Some key take-aways:

Postprint: osf.io/987fm_v1 To appear in Proceedings of Cog Sci 2025 DIMS Dashboard for Exploring Dynamic Interactions and Multimodal Signals. The interdisciplinary @graceqmiao.bsky.social in the lead here! Developing a dynamic dashboard for a quali-quanti social neuroscience research cycle!