New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science! "Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos" I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs. doi.org/10.1177/1745...

Next is @gabefajardo.bsky.social presenting on high dimensional neural representations of facial expressions

In the first #SANS2026 session on social learning @csavasegal.bsky.social shows that self-generated interpretations anchor how we remember ambiguous social info, even when others offer a different take, and how neural shifts help us make the shift

I’m thrilled to share that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Thanks to all my mentors and lab mates for the incredible support :)

Curious what a representation of "everything" you know might look like? Wonder how you might fill it in? Check out our demo and paper (led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social and now out in @natcomms.nature.com ), or read on to learn more! Demo: context-lab.com/mapper/ Paper: www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...

.@dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor Brad Duchaine discusses his research into prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, and prosopal metamorphopsia, a condition in which the perception of faces are distorted, on a recent episode of The Face with Masoud Saman.

We are hiring a post-bac fellow in Psychological & Brain Sciences at Dartmouth! This is a unique opportunity to collaborate across the labs of @katenautiyal.bsky.social, Kyle Smith, and myself. Please apply and share widely: apply.interfolio.com/182417

"These findings have important implications for how people interpret others' experiences.” A new study by @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professors Alireza Soltani and Tor Wager and Aryan Yazdanpanah, Guarini, shows how social information can change how people experience pain.

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

Please spread the word about a postbac position in Behavioral Neuroscience at Dartmouth with me, Shelley Warlow, and Kyle smith. The postbac will contribute to collaborative projects across the three labs aimed at studying the neuroscience of motivation and reward learning.

"I find that particularly exciting, because it reframes the amygdala not just as a fear-related structure, but as a key contributor to flexible cognition and behavior.” @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor Alireza Soltani discusses his recent study on the role of the amygdala.

Excited to share that our lab will be presenting multiple projects at SPSP 2026! If you’re interested in social perception, race talk, intergroup dynamics, or collective action — come check us out! #SPSP2026 #SocialPsychology #PersonalityPsychology #AcademicResearch #RaceTalk

Professor @esfinn.bsky.social of @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social received a 2026 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early-Career Contributions from @psychscience.bsky.social for her groundbreaking work investigating the neural underpinnings of human behavior and cognition. https://bit.ly/4scvVxL

Congratulations to @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social Prof Emily Finn (@esfinn.bsky.social) on winning the APS Spence Award!

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.

.@dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor @stolkarjen.bsky.social's latest research highlights why individualized communication approaches are crucial, with insights that could improve understanding of autism.

Congrats to @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor Tor Wager, who received the Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences from @nasonline.org. The prize recognizes Wager's pioneering research on the mind-body connection and innovative neuroimaging approaches. https://bit.ly/4k0glSM

Excited to be teaching a new undergraduate course on Models of Language and Conversation this term! Check it out here: context-lab.com/llm-course/ I've added lots of fun interactive demos of chatbots and NLP techniques that let students dig into the approaches.

I made a quirky little web app to help guide your lucid dreams: context-lab.com/dream-stream/ It's kind of like a "netflix" or "spotify" for lucid dreaming-- you select different narratives to form a playlist, and then it uses your device's microphone to start playing when it detects you're in REM.

🧠 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