Mark Thornton

Towards an informational account of interpersonal coordination - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Methodological shortcomings have constrained studies describing the complex dynamics of interpersonal coordination, which is essential to human sociality. In this Perspective, Chidichimo et al. advanc...

Not sure if you shared the actual paper link in your post? www.nature.com/articles/s41... My lab shared it on slack yesterday - we loved it!

Delighted to share our new Perspective article @natrevneuro.nature.com, led by the great @edoardochidichimo.bsky.social : "Towards an informational account of interpersonal coordination". With @loopyluppi.bsky.social, Pedro Mediano, @introspection.bsky.social, Victoria Leong and Richard Bethlehem.

And don't forget to first renew your membership/become a member! In addition to major discounts on conference registration, membership in SANS comes with other bonuses, including a 20% discount on open access fees at SCAN (new this year)! Details here: socialaffectiveneuro.org/membership/

A busy figure showing how reduction of different types of multimodal signals reduces over experimental rounds (with a comparison of how a non-linear signal following a power law can be transformed to a linear slope using a log-transformation).

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success.

www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

Another ~monthly update on the state of the #psychjobs market: more jobs continue to trickle in, though at a decreasing pace. We've nearly hit parity with covid in absolute terms, although the prior year baseline was higher this year than that, so we still see a slightly larger relative decrease.

Together, we’re critical to the comprehension and production of meaning! 🧠 @markthornton.bsky.social

Last call for data-blitz and poster submission for the Computational Psychology preconference @spspnews.bsky.social! See thread below for details and hope to see you in Chicago!

Dense Phenotyping of Human Brain Network Organization Using Precision fMRI The advent of noninvasive imaging methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) transformed cognitive neuroscience, providing insights into large-scale brain networks and their link to cog...

Why do brain networks vary? Do these differences shape behavior? If every 🧠 is unique, how can we detect common features of brain organization?
@rodbraga.bsky.social and I dig in, in @annualreviews.bsky.social (ahead of print):
go.illinois.edu/Gratton2025-...

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #MedSky
🧵👇

Preprint led by Salvador Vargas (on the job market!), with Chadly Stern, on stereotypes linking race & social class. We find a mean-level White–rich/Black–poor stereotype; the stereotype is strongest among third-group participants; and likely explained by social sampling: osf.io/preprints/ps...

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone?

Our new preprint, led by
@anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social
shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

One of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab!

We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!

📣 New preprint from the Braga Lab! 📣

The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network

Congrats to Dr. Joe Salvo for this epic set of results

Big Q: What brain systems support the translation of writing to concepts and meaning?

Thread 🧵 ⬇️

Developing Intuitions That Close Friends Know the Content of Each Other’s Minds Abstract. To maintain and develop close relationships, people need to accurately represent the minds of their social partners. Although studies have characterized many aspects of children’s intuitive ...

New paper in Open Mind, with @emmayu23.bsky.social, Megan Richardson, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that by 6 years of age, children think that close friends know the content of each other’s minds.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

@openmindjournal.bsky.social

I agree that there are plenty of computational people who are not AI obsessed or bandwagon riders. I hope some of them are getting these AI jobs instead of others who just started "doing AI" by prompting ChatGPT.

I think you're interpreting my attempt to provide some quantitative estimates on the phenomenon you're commenting on as a disagreement with the sentiment of your post. That's not how I intended it, and I'm sorry that's how it came across.

bsky.app/profile/mark...

I didn't comment on the normative desirability of the number of AI jobs. I also think that the AI hiring focus is unwise and obviously hype driven. My hope is that many cases are just hiring people they'd already want, using the AI label as leverage to get the line from uni/donors.

I mean, that job *does* say "computational" on the wiki, so it's included in the 9% figure I quoted. I think that illustrates my point that adding those secondary labels can help give us a rough upper, in addition to the lower bound that comes from looking for "AI" specifically.

That's why I included the computational/data science cases too, as a comparison, since I figured those would be the most likely to contain hidden AI.

Yeah, no - I haven't scraped the text of each ad because they're all on differently formatted sites which makes that a real pain. So as you say, it's possible that there are some which have that in the ad but not the wiki description.

A lot of the AI jobs are cross-listed across areas and ranks (more so than other jobs) which may contribute to the feeling that they are particularly prevalent - the estimates above taken cross-listing of the same job into account.

AI jobs currently make up ~4% of posts on the psych job wiki. If you throw in "computational" and "data" (science), that goes up to 9% For comparison, the median size of the content areas (e.g., clinical, social, cognitive, etc.) is typically around 6-8%.

As far as relative market-share among the areas, neuroscience/biopsych lost the most (-4% relative to last year) while clinical has gained the most (+5%). Of course, clinical was already the largest area, and thus it has lost the most in absolute terms from the general collapse of the market.

Comparing this year and covid to the years preceding each, this year currently represents a 1.5x larger drop. There are likely to still be some late job postings (more so than in previous years) but at this point we're sitting at 37% of last year's total.

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.

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...

The computational psych preconference is back @spspnews.bsky.social for a full day! This year's lineup:

👉theory-driven modeling: Hyowon Gweon
👉data-driven discovery: @clemensstachl.bsky.social
👉application: me
👉 panel: @steveread.bsky.social Sandra Matz, @markthornton.bsky.social Wil Cunningham

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... 🧵👇

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.

That said, I think departmental areas are often more political formations than intellectual ones. Having already compartmentalized ourselves, breaking down those administrative walls may result in more locally powerful subfields exerting hegemony over weaker ones, rather than interdisciplinarity.

I agree that folks should be pushed to reckon with differences in intellectual traditions across subfields more. Being interdisciplinary really exposes the tedious absurdity of many discipline-specific practices. Seeing how other folks operate can be reassuring or challenging, but always enriching.