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...

When you meet someone new, what kind of questions do you ask? It’s tempting to think that *really* getting to know people is just a matter of asking the right questions. Excited to share the next chapter in ongoing work on what makes a *deep question* with amazing collaborators...

📄🚨 Just published! We used EEG hyperscanning during naturalistic conversations to investigate interpersonal alignment at three distinct levels: brain-to-brain (neural coordination), brain-to-speech (neural speech tracking), and speech-to-speech (prosodic adaptation). (1/2) doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Our findings from our upcoming paper are featured on the Naked Scientist Podcast!!! 🤩

The science of sound and music

How has music evolved throughout history?

thenakedscientists.com

While speaking style does matter, willingness to extend a conversation depends primarily on interest in the topic, McGill researcher says: mcgill.ca/x/5hW (2/3)

Study yields new insights on what makes conversation engaging

What makes a speaker engaging? Both what is said and how it is said matter, but in different, complementary ways, a new study conducted at the McGill School of Communication Sciences and Disorders has...

mcgill.ca

Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027! This fall, I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M, where I will launch the Coupled Minds Lab. We will study how conversation shapes the way people connect, coordinate, and change their minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

What makes us want to stay engaged in a conversation? How do we modulate our voices to be engaging? Excited to share our new paper, "Not Worth My Time! Understanding Factors That Make Speech Socially Engaging". doi.org/10.1037/xhp0...

How do people reach agreement on public health issues? Using fMRI hyperscanning + NLP, we found that when conversation partners aimed to compromise rather than persuade, they explored a wider range of mental states and topics — and ended up agreeing more. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Successfully defended my PhD yesterday. Grateful to everyone who supported me along the way, and excited for the next chapter!

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

📣 New paper out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in which we investigated whether conversational alignment — the tendency to reuse each other's words, syntactic constructions, topics, sounds and gestures — can be used as a reliable individual trait. It cannot! 🧵 1/4 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Just wrapped up an inspiring few days at #CNS2026. It was very rewarding to present my work here (my first Data Blitz presentation!) and to connect with other people also working on speech processing and social interaction. Lots of ideas to take home!

Presenting at #CNS2026 in Vancouver! "Conversational engagement modulates neural speech tracking in real-time dialogue" (Poster D106) When? - Data Blitz Session 3 (Saturday, March 7, 10:30 am); - Poster Session D (Monday, March 9, 8:00 am). I’d love to connect and exchange ideas :)

All my #rstats ebooks are now in the quarto format, and hosted on Quarto Pub. Their old bookdown links will all be dead by the weekend. 1/3

Had a great time chatting with Ava about our latest conversation research. If you're interested in what makes for a good conversation, check it out! www.mindsmatterpodcast.com/s5-ep-01-you...

S5 Ep01: Your Mind on Conversation

What makes for a great conversation? Dr. Sebastian Spear shares his research using hyperscanning (neuroimaging on multiple brains at once) to study people's brains during real conversations. We discus...

mindsmatterpodcast.com

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 Annual reminder that the book is open access. How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing. Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective? #neuroskyence mitpress.mit.edu/978026254460...

The Entangled Brain

Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger ...

mitpress.mit.edu

Telling good science from bad – a user’s guide to navigating the scientific literature www.wiringthebrain.com/2021/08/tell...

New study out in Neuron: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne.... This work led by Zaid Zada uses fMRI hyperscanning of real dyads to show that speaking and listening rely on shared neural systems; and that conversation recruits unique brain processes that aren't observed in passive comprehension.

Great news to wrap the year!

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛@rmcelreath.bsky.social · 9mo ago

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

New paper alert! "Public Speakers With Nonnative Accents Garner Less Engagement" -- now out in Psych Science! This is my first graduate student's first first-author paper (and it was her first-year project). Short THREAD on the results:

🥳 So pleased to share our new publication: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... The whole @kinderstudien.bsky.social lab got together to do a little scientific retreat last year and this is the result - a truly developmental perspective on the phenomenon of interpersonal neural synchrony 🧠🧠 👨‍🍼👩‍🍼

A developmental framework of interpersonal neural synchrony

Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS), the temporal alignment of brain activities between individuals, has been proposed as a biomarker for successful …

sciencedirect.com

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.

First timer at #SANS2025 Will certainly be back!