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
A photo of Emily Finn, with text that reads, “Emily Finn, assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early-Career Contributions.”
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.
Photo of Tor Wager with overlaid text, “Tor Wager, Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience. Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.”
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...
A plot showing a 3D projection of 8 "authors" (each represented with a differently colored and labeled dot). Stylistic distances between authors are reflected by spatial distances in the plot.
🚨 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/
Fig. 1. a. Visual and auditory regions of interest (ROIs). b. Responses in a combination of visual (e.g., early dorsal visual stream; Fig. 1a, middle panel) and auditory regions were used to predict responses in the rest of the brain using MVPN. c. In order to identify brain regions that combine responses from auditory and visual regions, we identified voxels where predictions generated using the combined patterns from auditory regions and one set of visual regions jointly (as shown in Fig. 1b) are significantly more accurate than predictions generated using only auditory regions or only that set of visual regions.
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... 🧵👇
Effect of confound mass on true positive rates under FDR correction. Confound mass represents how large a confound is in terms of the product of its voxel extent and effect size. Results are shown at differing combinations of true effect size, true effect voxel extent, and sample size.
Inflated surface maps of meta-analytic z-statistics from Neurosynth for low-level confounds (top) and high-level cognitive tasks (bottom). Red reflects positive activations, blue reflects negative (de)activations, and darker colors indicate larger z-statistics. Maps are thresholded at |z| = 1 for visualization purposes.
Effect of confound effect size on true positive rates for task effects under FDR correction. Colors indicate sample sizes: N = 25 in blue, N = 50 in green, and N = 100 in orange. Effect sizes are reflected by the darkness of each color, with light shades representing d = .2, medium d = .5, and dark d = .8. The task brain maps and confound brain maps referenced in each panel are shown in Figure 3.
Effect of FDR-based publication bias on observed confound effects sizes. Simulated meta-analytic confound effect sizes are visualized through violin plots for each combination of task effect and confound effect examined in the neural data simulations. Meta-analyses featuring publication bias (orange) substantially inflate these effect size estimates in all cases, relative to meta-analyses featuring no publication bias (blue).
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...