Sebastian Speer

Looking forward to reading this - I became a massive fan of @judithholler.bsky.social after her TiCS paper last year

If you missed that one, here's the link

Facial clues to conversational intentions: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

S5 Ep01: Your Mind on Conversation What makes for a great conversation? Dr. Sebastian Spear shares his research using hyperscanning (neuroimaging on multiple brains at once) to study people's brains during real conversations. We discus...

Had a great time chatting with Ava about our latest conversation research. If you're interested in what makes for a good conversation, check it out!

www.mindsmatterpodcast.com/s5-ep-01-you...

New study out in Neuron: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne.... This work led by Zaid Zada uses fMRI hyperscanning of real dyads to show that speaking and listening rely on shared neural systems; and that conversation recruits unique brain processes that aren't observed in passive comprehension.

Today is Publication Day! 🎉
The Psychological Quest for Meaning is out!

Aimed at researchers, but we hope it is readable for anyone interested in how humans make sense of their lives.

Guilford Press is offering 15% off with code AU2E:
www.guilford.com/books/The-Ps...

Our latest hyperscanning study tracks how neural coupling unfolds during genuine conversation and how it differs from simply reading scripted dialogue: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Die Wissenschaft hinter gelungenem Smalltalk YouTube video by Menschen und Muster

Excellent new video on our recent work on the neural dynamics supporting good conversations. Check it out - if you speak German.

youtube.com/watch?si=XpW6ioXhz0E7z44w&v=zFMwFdTq-YI&feature=youtu.be

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science While AI coding tools have demonstrated potential to accelerate software development, their use in scientific computing raises critical questions about code quality and scientific validity. In this pa...

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 - our latest, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social

Pleased to share new work with @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social & undergrad interns at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA.

Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models
www.arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15987

🧵1/n

We will try to answer questions like: How do minds wander in new directions in conversation? How do we negotiate meaning and compromise when our paths diverge? And what happens when one of those minds belongs to a machine? - Please reach out if you're interested or have any questions.

Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2026!

The Coupled Minds Lab at @tamu.bsky.social will use a multimodal approach combining fMRI hyperscanning, computational modeling, and natural language processing to study how conversations transform minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io

Due Date Dec 1

Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the human brain | PNAS Speech comprehension involves transforming an acoustic waveform into meaning. To do so, the human brain generates a hierarchy of features that conv...

CogNeuroLanguage: new by @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @jeanremiking.bsky.social (w Alec Marantz & me) shows how the brain maintains-updates continuously unfolding lang hierarchy during comprehension, anchoring ling theories to biological implementation
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #neuroskyence

Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory How does the brain access stored knowledge? It has been proposed that conceptual search engages neurocognitive processes similar to foraging in physical space. We tested this idea using intracranial E...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Interaction Engine Cambridge Core - Semantics and Pragmatics - The Interaction Engine

just finished steve levinson's new book! it's a beautifully articulated argument for social interaction as the evolutionary niche which made language possible, rather than the other way around. progress in linguistics depends on a stronger science of interaction.

www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

We're a month further into the job market - how are things looking? The good news is that the market does seem to have been delayed: ~150 new listings have appeared since my last post. The bad news is that the total is still substantially lower than what it was during the covid dip.

Paper and R package for (more flexible) power analysis in multilevel: psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social
built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets!

We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it!
1/

Good Conversations Don’t Require Everybody to Agree, Neuroscience Shows Brain imaging is illuminating the patterns linked to productive, positive dialogue, and those insights could help people connect with others

@falklab.bsky.social wrote a nice summary of our hyperscanning work on how people form social connection and find agreement through conversation: www.scientificamerican.com/article/good...

Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition | PNAS Our ability to understand and control complex systems of many interacting parts remains limited. A key challenge is that we still do not know how b...

Finally published:
“Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition”
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

An information-theoretic framework to analyse complex multivariate dynamical processes ✨

“As AI tools become more capable, funding agencies and institutions may question why labs need dedicated computational staff. But these examples suggest the roles will become more important, not less”

Increasing alignment of large language models with language processing in the human brain - Nature Computational Science Larger LLMs’ self-attention more accurately predicts readers’ regressive saccades and fMRI responses in language regions, whereas instruction tuning adds no benefit.

📢Out now! @jixingli.bsky.social, @lamb-cityuhk.bsky.social and colleagues assess whether instruction tuning can enhance LLM's ability to capture linguistic information in the human brain. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #compneuro #ArtificialIntelligence

New Open dataset alert:
🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience!

N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks!

🧵below

How to compute surprisal (Shannon Information) for every word in your language sample. Then --- correlate surprisal with other major lexical-semantic variables (concreteness, semantic neighborhoods, freq). reilly-lab.github.io/Surprisal.html

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers.

My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers.

We found 437 of them.

Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

CICADA: An automated and flexible tool for comprehensive fMRI noise reduction Abstract. Independent component analysis (ICA) denoising methods can be highly effective for reducing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) noise. ICA denoising method success heavily depends, ...

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...

🔖 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....

Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies - Nature Human Behaviour This research advances a mechanistic reward learning account of social learning strategies. Through experiments and simulations, it shows how individuals learn to learn from others, dynamically shapin...

If you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of our reward learning account of social learning—the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model—check out our recent @nathumbehav.nature.com paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our conversation analysis software is now on CRAN! Reach out with any questions. We hope it’s useful for all you language and social interaction folks out there.

"We propose a unified quantitative model that integrates decision-making and communication, revealing how verbal framing of probabilistic expression both reflects and shapes beliefs in speakers and listeners."

Read more here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...