🧠 Why it matters 🧠 -The results challenge a prevailing view that 5‑HT2A activation alone drives psilocybin’s therapeutic actions. -Highlights the importance of polypharmacology 🥳, and points to the 1B receptor as a target for non‑hallucinogenic antidepressant and anxiolytic pharmacotherapies.

New paper drop! 🧠💊 Our new paper out in Molecular Psychiatry shows that the serotonin 1B receptor is important for the neural and antidepressant/anxiolytic behavioral responses to psilocybin in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Remember when grinding leetcode was still a thing? If you'd like to hone your coding skills, or even just return to that simpler time for nostalgia's sake, you might enjoy this project from our group: github.com/ContextLab/l... Happy hacking! 👩‍💻

Hope to see all of the serotonin enthusiasts at the ISSR mixer at SfN on Monday (people who find dopamine rewarding are welcome too). register here: pci.jotform.com/form/2528274...

🚨 New preprint alert! We use trained-from-scratch GPT-2 models to characterize & capture the unique writing styles of individual authors. We also develop a new LLM-based relative stylometric measure. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.21958 Code/data: github.com/ContextLab/l... 🤗: huggingface.co/contextlab

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/

I’m excited to share my 1st first-authored paper, “Distinct portions of superior temporal sulcus combine auditory representations with different visual streams” (with @mtfang.bsky.social and @steanze.bsky.social ), now out in The Journal of Neuroscience! www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

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.

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... 🧵👇

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...

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!)

Hung-tu Chen, Nicolas Tritsch, Matt van der Meer, and I have submitted a new preprint (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) in which we use simultaneous hippocampal ephys and ventral striatal (VS) fiber photometry to establish a link between sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) and VS dopamine (DA) in mice. (1/9)

I'm starting to work on a new library, "clustrix" ( clustrix.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to ease switching between local vs. remote execution in Python scripts, notebooks, etc. This has been a pain point for my group for a while!

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/

🤠 New release announcement for our datawrangler package! Try it using: pip install --upgrade pydata-wrangler Lots of awesome performance improvements (including native polars support!), simplified API, support for @hf.co text embeddings, etc. More info here: data-wrangler.readthedocs.org

well its officially official - I graduated yesterday! 🎓 super honored to have also received my department’s promise award in brain science research. pumped to start my postdoc next month!!

🏔️ Brad is lost in the wilderness—but doesn’t know there’s a town nearby. Was he forced to stay put? In our #CogSci2025 paper, we show that judgments of what’s possible—and whether someone had to act—depend on what agents know. 📰 osf.io/preprints/ps... w/ Matt Mandelkern & @jsphillips.bsky.social

Excited to see everyone at #VSS2025 - Come check out what my lab has been up to over this past year:

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

New preprint! Thrilled to share my latest work with @esfinn.bsky.social -- "Sensory context as a universal principle of language in humans and LLMs" osf.io/preprints/ps...

New Preprint with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here we show increased neural delay activity associated with remembering features as part of real-world objects. 1/

More Dartmouth PBS at #SANS2025!

Our third speaker @zizhuangmiao.bsky.social discusses the modality-general nature and overlap between neural correlates of social interaction and theory of mind

SCRAP Lab had a great time at #SANS2025! Can't wait till next year!

More Dartmouth PBS at #SANS2025!

More Dartmouth PBS at #SANS2025!

Congratulations to Dartmouth PBS's @markthornton.bsky.social for winning the @sansmeeting.bsky.social Early Career Award! 👏👏👏

The home stretch of #SANS2025 kicks off with the early career award talk by @markthornton.bsky.social. Congrats, Mark!!

SANS president @ajaysatpute.bsky.social introducing our #SANS2025 early career award winner @markthornton.bsky.social!

Building on the early foundation identifying "where" to answer questions about "how" Congratulations again @markthornton.bsky.social

Mark shares his work on impression updating in dynamic naturalistic, settings using cutting edge computational tools:

Awesome multimodal work from @markthornton.bsky.social showing how information from face, voice and substance of convos combine to impact person-perception judgements #SANs2025

Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social responds: AI models as biomarkers, annotations and cognitive models; and as aids in coding and writing

AI in social & affective neuroscience: Caution or acceleration? 🤖 Mohammad Atari @mohammadatari.bsky.social 🆚 Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social Can AI be our Co-Pilot - or should we slow down? LaSalle Ballroom, don’t miss it! #SANS2025

In a new paper, we demonstrate the perception of possibilities but show that the processes underlying this phenomenon occur before the information reaches high-level cognition. The representation of these possibilities is distinctly perceptual(!) and separate from cognition. osf.io/preprints/ps...

We're super excited to announce that we've officially convinced @cgonciulea.bsky.social to join our rag-tag (but VERY classy) team of science nerds this fall as a @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social PhD student 🎉🥳🤓🧠🧑‍🔬🎓!!

Dartmouth PBS at #SANS2025!

Wearing a lot of different hats (or rather, badges) at #SANS2025!

I'm THRILLED to announce that this fall, I will be joining the Psychological and Brain Sciences department at Dartmouth as a PhD student!!! I'll will be working with the amazing @markthornton.bsky.social and the SCRAP Lab! 🌲🧠

We're delighted to welcome @gabefajardo.bsky.social to SCRAP Lab and @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social as the newest member of our team!

We're delighted to be welcoming Gus Cooney to the department as an Assistant Professor in 2026!

Meet 2025 APS Janet Taylor Spence recipient @markthornton.bsky.social, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and director of the Social Computation Representation and Prediction Laboratory.

Congrats to Daphne Muhammad ’25, who received the Gordon Allport Fellowship from #Dartmouth’s Consortium for Interacting Minds! Her honors thesis with @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social examines how conversations about race shape relationships and allyship among racially diverse groups.

In a new preprint (doi.org/10.31234/osf...) a huge range of data+methods shows that people can evaluate what others know without first evaluating what they think/believe. Representations of knowledge seem to be an independent and conceptually primitive way of representing others' minds. 🧵 below!

New preprint! My entry into the ongoing AI empathy discussion: "Reframing the performance and ethics of 'empathic' AI: Wisdom of the crowd and placebos." osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper out at @naturehumbehav.bsky.social! This is the most comprehensive investigation ever conducted into how people think about relationships: a true tour de force! We identify 5 dimensions and 3 categories that organize relationship concepts. Proud to have made a (small) contribution to it!

Dartmouth PBS showing up to our local Stand Up For Science rally on the Green!

The cat's out of the bag - yes, I received the NOA for my NSF CAREER grant yesterday! I'm deeply grateful for, and honored by, the confidence in my research that this award implies. And I'm excited to use this support to study how people detect, predict, and regulate each other's mental states!

We are organizing a Stand Up for Science rally at Dartmouth College! When: This Friday, March 7th, at 12pm (noon) Where: Center of the Dartmouth Green

I have always considered SANS to be my "home" conference/society, so I am delighted and deeply honored to receive this year's SANS Early Career Award!