Jadyn Park

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...

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.

Various soups on a kitchen stovetop: a vegetarian chili, a potato-leek soup, a sweet pumpkin soup, and a cauliflower rosemary soup

If anyone's looking for ideas for wintertime lab activities, my lab did a soup exchange over the weekend. We had a great time on a day that was cold even by Chicago standards! Credit to @mystiesaturday.bsky.social for suggesting it and to @jadynpark.bsky.social for the photo.

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

netneurotools: a trainee-oriented approach to network neuroscience | doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Our lab’s internal toolkit for accomplishing everyday tasks in brain imaging ⤵️

Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused o...

Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb

Continuous dynamics of cooperation and competition in social decision-making - Communications Psychology Using a continuous social foraging game, this study shows that human pairs adopt stable cooperative, competitive, or mixed strategies. A computational model predicts dyadic choices and links these str...

This study shows that human pairs adopt stable cooperative, competitive, or mixed strategies. A computational model predicts dyadic choices and links these strategies to interaction dynamics, payoffs, and cost of cooperation.
@violapriesemann.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Thrilled to see this reviewed preprint by grad student extraordinaire (but bsky-less) Euan Prentis posted on @elife.bsky.social! doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Thank you to the reviewers and editors for encouraging, insightful and helpful comments. We will be revising the paper, stay tuned!

Woohoo! Congrats, Matthias! 🎉

Interested in how the brain prepares for upcoming tasks? We trained a monkey on “6” different cognitive tasks and recorded prefrontal cortical activity. We examined the neural geometry and dynamics during task preparation. Come check out our poster on SUNDAY(Nov 16) from 1-5 PM!

I'm going to present our latest memory model that learns causal inference during narrative comprehension! Stop by the poster on Monday to chat about causality, memory, brain🧠, and AI🤖!
#sfn2025 #sfn25

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...

New Research Explores What Makes Emotional Memories Stick - DSI By Sarah Steimer We can think of emotional experiences as sticky, explains the study’s senior author Yuan Chang (YC) Leong, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and DSI Affiliate Resear...

A new study in 'Nature Human Behavior' led by UChicago researchers combines fMRI data and natural language processing to understand how emotions lead to enhanced memory encoding, or "stickiness."

Learn more: bit.ly/3Lec2Gf

@jadynpark.bsky.social @ycleong.bsky.social

Longitudinal intergenerational hyperscanning reveals indices of relationship formation and loneliness Loneliness is globally acknowledged as a severe and burgeoning health risk, fuelling interest in helping people of all ages form meaningful social connections. One promising approach consists of inter...

What happens in the brain as people become less lonely? Intergenerational community programs can reduce loneliness, the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. We collected and analysed 732 🧠-scans to find out!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
@introspection.bsky.social + @escross.bsky.social

Thank you, Lydia! 😊

This was a huge team effort, with co-authors @kruthig03.bsky.social , @jinke.bsky.social, @matthiasnau.bsky.social, Ioannis Pappas, and @ycleong.bsky.social. This work would not have been possible without the MRI datasets made publicly available by Drs. Janice Chen, Hongmi Lee, and Emily Finn

Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw

Really excited to share a review I contributed to, out now in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social. We explore how foraging can offer a framework for studying brain and behaviour in natural contexts. It’s been a pleasure working with colleagues across species and disciplines on this. Check it out! 👇

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

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

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

Studying memory narratives with natural language processing Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...

Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that!

Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9

Ongoing thoughts at rest reflect functional brain organization and behavior Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC)-brain connectivity observed when people rest with no external tasks-predicts individual differences in behavior. Yet, rest is not idle; it involves streams...

New preprint! 🧠

Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10).
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

Preprint⭐
Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A neurocomputational account of motivated seeing Do goals, beliefs, and desires affect visual experience? This question has long been controversial in cognitive science. There exists extensive litera…

Excited to share our new review on how neuroimaging and computational models can help uncover how people see what they want to see, now out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! It was a blast writing this with Haena Kim and @iancballard.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Seamless Interaction: Dyadic Audiovisual Motion Modeling and Large-Scale Dataset Human communication involves a complex interplay of verbal and nonverbal signals, essential for conveying meaning and achieving interpersonal goals. To develop socially intelligent AI technologies, it...

Seamless Interaction dataset with 4000+ hrs of face-to-face dyadic interactions! 🤯

Seems like it could be a game changer for studying embodied turn-taking & mutual adaptation complementary with CANDOR, etc...

arxiv.org/abs/2506.22554

Icon image of computer screen with text messaging conversation shown

🗣️ New paper alert! Ever wonder how strangers navigate the messy world of casual conversation? We analyzed 200+ video calls to uncover the hidden structure behind "idle talk" – and found it's way more systematic than you'd think!

Thread 👇

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] 🧵

Strangers chatted once a week for 6 weeks and as they became closer, their self-reported emotions were *less* aligned after conversations. Fits with recent work (by @sebospeer.bsky.social @dianatamir.bsky.social et al) suggesting friends are free to explore and diverge