Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...
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.
“We are not getting AI empathy. We are getting a synthesis of human empathy.” @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor @markthornton.bsky.social argues AI “empathy” results from the averaging of human responses, not machine feeling.
Seeking Empathy in the Age of AI
Findings are pushing psychologists to ask not only whether AI can simulate empathy, but what empathy requires in the first place.
psychologicalscience.org
APS (@psychscience.bsky.social) Observer coverage of recent research and perspectives on AI empathy: www.psychologicalscience.org/publications... Including comments from me relating to my recent PoPS article: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Seeking Empathy in the Age of AI
Findings are pushing psychologists to ask not only whether AI can simulate empathy, but what empathy requires in the first place.
psychologicalscience.org
"From the earliest moments of taking in a new environment, we make radically different choices about what we pay attention to.” @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor @carolinerobertson.bsky.social’s new study finds what our eyes seek out can identify us.
What catches your eye in new places could identify you
The first things you notice in a new place create unique eye movement patterns that can identify you, highlighting risks from eye tracking.
earth.com
Incredibly proud of my first PhD student @lindseytepfer.bsky.social for defending her dissertation yesterday! Lindsey was a founding member of SCRAP Lab, and her presence will always be felt here. We'll miss her greatly, but we're excited for her future endeavours, starting soon with @inquirer.com!
Now in press at Cortex! "False discovery rate correction promotes confounded neuroimaging designs" Paper 🔓: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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...
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
Very excited to share this paper, led by @ajhaskins.bsky.social ! We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic — and that these gaze patterns are shaped in part by the conceptual priorities each person brings to a scene. 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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
Meet @esfinn.bsky.social, Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social. Finn is a 2026 APS Spence Award recipient whose research focuses on individual variability in brain activity and behavior. www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
Check out this 4-part series on a really rewarding collaboration with filmmakers @theskindeep.bsky.social We’ve been conducting research on their videos, and they created videos about our research! Excited to see what unfolds as we continue digging deeper together. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
The Science of Human Connection - YouTube
youtube.com
Hello to everyone coming to @vssmtg.bsky.social: Come see what our lab and collaborators have been working on this past year. - Lots of interesting new work on visual working memory, feature- and object-based attention, cross-modal attention, ensemble perception!
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
.@dartmouthpbs.bsky.social researchers highlight the neural underpinnings of a rare face perception disorder in which the brain generates an overwhelming—and false—sense of familiarity, causing everyone, even complete strangers, to seem familiar.
When Every Stranger Feels Like a Friend | Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Dartmouth researchers highlight the neural underpinnings of a rare face perception disorder.
fas.dartmouth.edu
Congratulations to Dartmouth PBS Professor James Haxby (@haxbylab.bsky.social) on being elected to the National Academy of Sciences!
We are thrilled to announce the election of 120 members and 25 international members to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continued achievements in original research. Congratulations to our new #NASmembers and welcome to the Academy! 🎊
“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
New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science! "Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos" I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs. doi.org/10.1177/1745...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
doi.org
Next is @gabefajardo.bsky.social presenting on high dimensional neural representations of facial expressions
In the first #SANS2026 session on social learning @csavasegal.bsky.social shows that self-generated interpretations anchor how we remember ambiguous social info, even when others offer a different take, and how neural shifts help us make the shift
I’m thrilled to share that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Thanks to all my mentors and lab mates for the incredible support :)
Curious what a representation of "everything" you know might look like? Wonder how you might fill it in? Check out our demo and paper (led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social and now out in @natcomms.nature.com ), or read on to learn more! Demo: context-lab.com/mapper/ Paper: www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Knowledge Mapper
An interactive tool that maps out everything you know. Answer questions and watch your personalized knowledge map take shape.
context-lab.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
We are hiring a post-bac fellow in Psychological & Brain Sciences at Dartmouth! This is a unique opportunity to collaborate across the labs of @katenautiyal.bsky.social, Kyle Smith, and myself. Please apply and share widely: apply.interfolio.com/182417
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.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
Excited to share that our lab will be presenting multiple projects at SPSP 2026! If you’re interested in social perception, race talk, intergroup dynamics, or collective action — come check us out! #SPSP2026 #SocialPsychology #PersonalityPsychology #AcademicResearch #RaceTalk