Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences

@dartmouthpbs.bsky.social

Official account of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Follow for research, learning resources, events, news, and job postings.

Now in press at Cortex! "False discovery rate correction promotes confounded neuroimaging designs" Paper 🔓: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Effect of confound mass on true positive rates under test-wise FDR correction in completely arbitrary data. Confound mass represents how large a confound is in terms of the product of the number of tests it is present in, and its mean effect size across these tests. Results are shown at differing combinations of true effect size, number of tests with true (i.e., non-confound) effects, 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.The difference in integrated true positive rate between parcel-wise FDR and parcel-wise FWER (y-axis) is plotted as a function of confound effect size. Each point represents 1 out of 5000 studies simulated for each combination of task and confound. Smoothed loess lines are used to better show the overall trends.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). Moreover, this bias was present – and in most cases larger – in the subset of studies that were included in the meta-analysis specifically when the publication bias was based on FDR instead of FWER integrated true positive rates (green).
Mark Thornton@markthornton.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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...

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.

New research from #Dartmouth professor @carolinerobertson.bsky.social finds your eye movements are so distinctive that AI can identify you by your gaze alone—revealing the "conceptual priorities" that shape what each of us notices in a new scene.

Your Gaze Has a Signature | Faculty of Arts and Sciences

No two people take in a new scene quite the same way, a new Dartmouth study finds, using AI to map where we look.

fas.dartmouth.edu

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

nature.com

Check out our latest collab with Manish Saggar, @richardfbetzel.bsky.social, et al. (lead: Chunyin Siu)! We use TDA to show that 2nd-order (edge) brain interactions more distinctly segregate task connections than other kinds of network patterns. Paper/code/data: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Global topology of brain-wide co-fluctuations links task states, personality, and behavioral symptom dimensions

Functional connectivity in network neuroscience is traditionally characterized using time-averaged correlations between brain regions. While these summaries capture stable large-scale organization, they do not fully reflect the temporal structure of moment-to-moment interactions. Here, we investigate how the order of interaction used to represent brain dynamics shapes the organization recovered from neural data. We compare three interaction representations of fMRI dynamics: regional activation (node time series), pairwise co-fluctuations (edge time series), and higher-order triplet interactions (triangle time series); within a common topological framework using Mapper from topological data analysis (TDA). Across task and resting-state data, Mapper representations derived from pairwise co-fluctuations more distinctly segregate task conditions than activation-based or higher-order representations. This organization reflects structured coordination patterns beyond activation polarity and is driven by high-amplitude interaction events. Beyond task states, modularity quality computed across all Mapper representations is highest for edge time series and selectively associated with stable individual differences: higher modularity relates to higher conscientiousness and lower internalizing and externalizing symptom dimensions. Together, these findings suggest that behaviorally relevant information is reflected in the topology of moment-to-moment brain interactions. Topological analysis of interaction-level dynamics therefore provides a complementary and interpretable framework for linking large-scale neural coordination to cognition, personality, and mental health. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Institute of Mental Health, https://ror.org/04xeg9z08, MH127608 Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute, https://ror.org/00yt0ea73, Faculty Scholar Award

biorxiv.org

According to a new @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social study, what others say about an experience can shape how it actually feels. The findings, published in @pnas.org, show that social information can influence how people experience negative events and bias perceptions of pain and mental effort.

People's Opinions Can Shape How Negative Experiences Feel | Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Study finds what others say can bias perceptions of pain and mental effort.

fas.dartmouth.edu

The @nasonline.org has elected @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor James Haxby as a member, recognizing his distinguished research in computational cognitive neuroscience, including how thoughts and perceptions can be decoded from brain activity patterns.

James Haxby Elected to the National Academy of Sciences | Faculty of Arts and Sciences

The professor specializes in computational cognitive neuroscience and neural decoding.

fas.dartmouth.edu

“The key concept is that not every child learns the same way.” @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor Caroline Robertson, director of the #Dartmouth Autism Research Initiative, talks about the prevalence of neurodiversity ahead of a panel with Temple Grandin about young neurodivergent learners.

Temple Grandin returns to her N.H. school with a message for neurodivergent youth: ‘Sky’s the limit’ - The Boston Globe

Grandin considers the early years she spent in N.H. as one of the most formative experiences of her life.

bostonglobe.com

.@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.

Episode 3: When Faces Look Distorted |The Brain Disorder You’ve Never Heard Of w/ Dr. Brad Duchaine)

Podcast Episode · The Face with Masoud Saman · March 7 · 33m

podcasts.apple.com

"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.

What others say about pain shapes how our brain experiences it

New research from Dartmouth College shows that hearing about others’ experiences can change how people feel pain, effort, and difficulty.

earth.com

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

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

tinyurl.com

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.

Our Brain's “Fear Center” May Guide Complex Learning Decisions, New Research Reveals

The brain’s primitive “fear center” may be much more than that, according to new research on the amygdala.

thedebrief.org