Mark Thornton

🔖 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....

bsky.app/profile/mark...

Oops! My categories got scrambled when I was merging data from the new and old wikis. Should have double-checked that. Here's the corrected version - sorry about that, folks!

Oh, shoot - sorry, that's my mistake! My labels got scrambled when combining the data from the old wiki and the new wiki. Thanks for pointing that out! I'll post a revised version presently. The category you're referring to that actually emerged in 2022 was community/diversity.

Yeah... I'm worried this year may be even worse, at least from a market perspective 😬

The relative sizes of the areas are pretty well matched, so it doesn't seem like the move to the new wiki, or the cross-listing policy change, were drastically disruptive of wiki use.

Also, cross-listing works differently on the new wiki (there is no "primary" entry). To deal with this, I gave each job 1/(total # of [cross-]listings) weight when summing up the counts for each category. As usual, some categories were collapsed/re-named for cross-year consistency.

It look me longer than usual to get to this, in part because of the transition to the new job wiki, which required me to rewrite my scraping code.

In advance of next year's (likely dire) job market, here are the 2024-2025 numbers from the psych job wiki: the overall number of tenure-track job listings in psychology and neuroscience fell slightly, from 860 to 822 (this doesn't include canceled searches, which are often not properly reported).

New paper led by @codydong.bsky.social now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, exploring the relationship between memory-augmented LLMs and human episodic memory – see Cody’s post below for a short thread and a non-paywalled paper link! #NeuroAI doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Make them look good, and people might even trust the research: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 new paper out!
Perception of motion and of social interactions are two processes that happen to be localized around the same brain anatomy: lateral occipitotemporal areas. Is motion necessary to see social interactions network?
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@cnrs.fr @babylyon.bsky.social

🎉New paper out @Psychological Review on the neuroscience of intergroup contact🎉

Led by the fantastic @margaretrwelte.bsky.social ‬and Jas Cloutier!

@apajournals.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social @sansmeeting.bsky.social #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #AcademicSky

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Check out Zaid's open "Podcast" ECoG dataset for natural language comprehension (w/ Hasson Lab). The paper is now out at Scientific Data (nature.com/articles/s41...) and the data are available on OpenNeuro (openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...).

Check out our new work with @xallysie.bsky.social, @erichehman.bsky.social, and my student Ruoying on a tutorial for Representational Similarity Analysis! Thanks for the fun collaboration!!

First paper from my lab out @commspsychol.nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00275-w

Latent factor models are popular for mental representation of people, e.g. warmth & competence

But we show in naturalistic contexts, more complex representations are needed: high-dimensional networks

Perceived community alignment increases information sharing - Nature Communications Information sharing is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior. Here, the authors use neuroimaging and behavioral studies to show that people are driven to share information that they believe will be ...

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Groundbreaking work by @martamasilva.bsky.social using intracranial recordings to study event boundaries and event memory, revealing neural mechanisms that we haven't been able to measure with fMRI!

SANS 2025/2026 | Committee Interest Form Would you be interested in getting more involved in the SANS Community as a committee member ? If yes, fill out the below form and we will be in touch with additional information on opportunities ava...

🌟 Want to get more involved in the SANS Community? 🌟

Consider joining one of the SANS working committees! We welcome interest from all levels - from graduate student to emeritus professor!

Interested? Fill out the form here:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Deadline: July 19, 2025

Jason and I wearing Chicago Booth swag, inadvertently looking like new MBA students. We are smiling and celebrating at a restaurant!

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/

How do different languages converge on a shared neural substrate for conceptual meaning? Happy to share a new preprint led by Zaid Zada that specifically addresses this question:

Really excited to share our new preprint led by @ahmadsamara.bsky.social with Zaid Zada, @vanderlab.bsky.social, and Uri Hasson titled "Cortical language areas are coupled via a soft hierarchy of model-based linguistic features" doi.org/10.1101/2025...

new preprint - do you use #fnirs to study cognition? do you want to learn how to design better studies? our primer aims to get you started on using #fnirs for real-world #cognitive #neuroscience

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Paper in @pnas.org in which @d-melnikoff.bsky.social and I provide evidence for model-based effects on automatic evaluation. This was a super fun “adversarial” collaboration with 0 adversariality. It may have been nice to be right, but getting it right is nearly as nice: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A high-dimensional model of social impressions People form social impressions from visual cues such as faces, which are argued by various models to arise from some limited set of fixed dimensions (e.g., trustworthiness and dominance). We argue tha...

In a TiCS paper, @chujunlin.bsky.social & I propose a high-dimensional model of social impressions.

Existing models focus on 2–4 latent dimensions (e.g. trustworthy/warm), but they often fall apart across different contexts, cultures, & perceivers. We need a paradigm shift.

shorturl.at/7GD1n (1/8)

In the past week, a union leader has been arrested, a U.S. Rep charged with a crime, a U.S. Senator violently handcuffed, and reporters shot with rubber bullets and detained. There is no ambiguity. This is a regime operating as an authoritarian. Americans who believe in liberty must oppose it.

How do we make new connections? Ashley Binnquist, Agnieszka Pluta, Bear Goldstein, Rick Dale, @socialbrain.bsky.social and I just posted a new preprint on the neurocognitive processes that support meaningful social connection. 🧠🧠💬💬 [1/8] 🧵

Our new paper is now out in Nature Human Behaviour:

The chronospatial revolution in psychology.

With Joe Henrich & Jonathan Schulz.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🥳Excited to share that I am joining Columbia July 2025
@columbiauniversity.bsky.social

Looking for🚨lab managers🚨postdocs🚨grad students! Pls REPOST🙏

We study⭐️person perception⭐️social cognition using experimental, cross-cultural, & computational methods!

App👉shorturl.at/5UVPl
More👉shorturl.at/q18GM