New paper out in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology! 🎉 How do we figure out who will accept or reject us in a new group? We show that people generalize relational value across friendship ties—forming a network gradient of approach & avoidance. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lq3x51f8w...

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard! Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it? We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵

I'm so excited to finally share work that’s been a couple of years in the making! See our new paper on *social interactions in #autism*, co-authored with Isabel Dziobek, @antoniahamilton.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social in @autisminadulthood.bsky.social 🎉 www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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.

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Prolonged Isolation is associated with an increased behavioural sensitivity to ‘Likes’ on social media. 🧵 Social media rewards are inherently social—but does posting change during social isolation, when in-person social rewards are limited? It turns out, yes!

To prevent Ps from pasting (GPT-generated) responses to your text entry Qualtrics question, disable pasting. Add this code to the OnReady section of your question's javascript: jQuery("#"+this.questionId+" .InputText").on("cut copy paste",function(e) { e.preventDefault(); }); Enjoy!

A work of art

In this study, @mayucel.bsky.social et al. examine how skin and hair characteristics impact functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) signal quality, and provide recommendations for inclusive use of fNIRS. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

If you're an author and haven't yet signed up for the Anthropic settlement, do yourself a favor (and strike a blow against AI) by checking to see if any of your books were involved. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

They're openly calling to lock up every trans person by force. We need every ally to speak out forcefully against this because trans folks cannot do this on our own.

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)

New preprint! 🧠 Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10). doi.org/10.1101/2025...

5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...

If you work in message testing or persuasive communication, this may be the most importantly paper you will read this month, perhaps all year. From @carnes.bsky.social and Henderson in @bjpols.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The lateral prefrontal cortex 🧠— which we think of as critical for goal driven behavior + is a target for psychiatric treatments— is fundamentally different in individuals relative to the group averages we’ve often studied. 👇see preprint and thread, led by Zach Ladwig #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Do you agree PsyArXiv is a valuable service? Then please consider joining the PsyArXiv moderation team to keep it that way (more info in the link below)! There's a 1-hour training session this coming Monday, Aug 18 at 1pm ET, and the minimum commitment is just 1h/month! (reposting also helps :))

Paper on the problems of using LLMs as replacements for human participants journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

New preprint🔊🧓: Why do we trust our friends more? We show that people are more efficient at evaluating information when making trust decisions about friends. This is preserved across the adult life span. W/ @jjfcastrellon.bsky.social . Feedback welcome: osf.io/tkpmv_v1

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

My brilliant labmate, Keith Dodd, created this non-aggressive denoising pipeline for fMRI data for his dissertation! It has been super useful on some of our high-motion datasets, and I highly suggest folks check it out for their own studies 🧠📈🪲: direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

I'm reviewing PhD applications this cycle to join my lab at @uwpsych.bsky.social in Fall ‘26. Ideal for those interested in dev, decision-making, emotion regulation, fMRI, and quant/comp methods. We have cool stuff in the works and want more brilliant ppl in the fold! psych.wisc.edu/joao-guassi-...

🚨 Fresh preprint w/ @helenblank.bsky.social! How does the brain acquire expectations about a conversational partner, and how are priors integrated w/ sensory inputs? Current evidence diverges. Is it prediction error? Sharpening? Spoiler: It's both.👀 🧵1/16 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

Our latest paper, led by @yizhang96.bsky.social, finds Pavlovian learning shapes empathy: People can link another person's abstract mental states—like feeling good or bad—with reward. This shapes empathy in new situations where those feelings are perceived.

Hi friends - new paper! about the cognitive mechanisms underlying social categorization and polarization. "Increased complexity of social category markers leads to diverse rule-based categorizations and reduced intergroup bias" more below... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

🚨We are recruiting a lab manager who will spend 80% of their effort in my lab and 20% of their effort in @leorhackel.bsky.social's lab. Please share widely! Apply at usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange... with: completed questionnaire (socolab.org/lab-manager-application), CV & Cover Letter!

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying. Deadline: October 1, 2025 Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Predictive processing models posit top-down influences of internal models on brain processing at multiple levels...but how deeply does predictive info penetrate into perception? What are the limits? New paper with @rotembot.bsky.social and @fmristats.bsky.social link.growkudos.com/1mmf28pbmkg

Online #fMRI course coming up August 6-8! 3-day intensive with lectures and hands-on analysis for all skill levels. #SPM, #ICA, #DataScience with @vcalhoun.bsky.social and Kent Kiehl. We love teaching this course and meeting students from all areas! Info+Reg here: sites.google.com/dartmouth.ed...

Calling out to #neuroskyence: Pomona College is hiring! This is a position for a tenure-track assistant professor in systems-level neuroscience. We are eager to hear from candidates with a commitment to teaching and research excellence with undergraduates academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30265

"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory." arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063

I will unfortunately have to skip SCiL this year, but I am thrilled to share that Jwalanthi will be presenting this work by her, @rjha.bsky.social, me, and @kmahowald.bsky.social on a tool that allows you to project contextualized embeddings from LMs to interpretable semantic spaces!

1- The neuroscience & psychology chapters of Sutton & Barto 2nd edition. full PDF: incompleteideas.net/book/RLbook2... 2- A brief history of intelligence. Not neuroAI, but popular among grad students at RLC & our MSR interns as a deep conceptual introduction. www.abriefhistoryofintelligence.com/book

9/ Check out the actual study for many more analyses, e.g., phenotypic variation, scan parameters, signal to noise ratio, etc! doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thank you to the editor @meharpist.bsky.social and anonymous reviewers for the many helpful suggestions, which greatly improved the study.

8/ In contrast to standard power calculations, our results suggest that jointly optimizing sample size and scan time can boost prediction accuracy while cutting costs. For more complex study design, you can check out our calculator: thomasyeolab.github.io/OptimalScanT...

When listening to a story, earlier parts of the story (context) and the speaker's gestures help us predict and understand what they are saying. In a new preprint we show context and gestures have a push-pull synergy on neural response to linguistic information 👇🧵

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Seamless Interaction dataset with 4000+ hrs of face-to-face dyadic interactions! 🤯 Seems like it could be a game changer for studying embodied turn-taking & mutual adaptation complementary with CANDOR, etc... arxiv.org/abs/2506.22554

Finally, we developed a set of interactive tutorials for preprocessing and running encoding models to get you started. Happy to hear any feedback or field any questions about the dataset! hassonlab.github.io/podcast-ecog...

Check out our new TICS paper on disagreement and metacognition! We argue that disagreement drives metacognitive development by expanding children's consideration sets. With Antonia Langenhoff, Bill Thompson @wdt.bsky.social and Mahesh Srinivasan www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share our new review on how neuroimaging and computational models can help uncover how people see what they want to see, now out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! It was a blast writing this with Haena Kim and @iancballard.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it. In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2) 👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Online Now: Disagreement drives metacognitive development