Many of you asked how we create those pretty whole-brain plots with the cortical outline. We just made it available as a Python package: pni-lab.github.io/quickbrain/

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

Why do people devalue empathic responses believed to be edited by AI? Because empathy is a predictive social signal: genuine human empathy updates expectations about closeness and social trust. The signaling function of empathy collapses when it is cheaply outsourced. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Real-world data reveal that cooperation continually falls and rebounds. Motivation to cooperate must therefore be actively renewed rather than assumed to sustain itself go.nature.com/4tvFx7I

Human cooperation undergoes constant breakdown and repair

Real-world data reveal that cooperation continually falls and rebounds. Motivation to cooperate must therefore be actively renewed rather than assumed to sustain itself.

go.nature.com

Excited to share our new Nature Methods paper on DeepCor, a contrastive autoencoder for denoising fMRI. DeepCor separates neural signal from noise at the voxel level, works for single participants, and outperforms CompCor by up to 215% on real data. 1/7 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

DeepCor: denoising fMRI data with contrastive autoencoders - Nature Methods

DeepCor is a deep-learning-based denoising approach for task-based and resting-state fMRI data that can be used even for single participants.

doi.org

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-...

Looking forward to reading this - I became a massive fan of @judithholler.bsky.social after her TiCS paper last year If you missed that one, here's the link Facial clues to conversational intentions: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Facial clues to conversational intentions

It has long been known that we use words to perform speech acts foundational to everyday conversation, such as requesting, informing, proposing, or complaining. However, the natural environment of hum...

cell.com

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics@mpi-nl.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Psycholinguistic perspectives on face-to-face conversation. New paper by @judithholler.bsky.social & Anna K. Kuhlen doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00538-1 rdcu.be/e4rlV

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...

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

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.

Today is Publication Day! 🎉 The Psychological Quest for Meaning is out! Aimed at researchers, but we hope it is readable for anyone interested in how humans make sense of their lives. Guilford Press is offering 15% off with code AU2E: www.guilford.com/books/The-Ps...

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...

Excellent new video on our recent work on the neural dynamics supporting good conversations. Check it out - if you speak German. youtube.com/watch?si=XpW6ioXhz0E7z44w&v=zFMwFdTq-YI&feature=youtu.be

Die Wissenschaft hinter gelungenem Smalltalk

YouTube video by Menschen und Muster

youtube.com

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 - our latest, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science

While AI coding tools have demonstrated potential to accelerate software development, their use in scientific computing raises critical questions about code quality and scientific validity. In this pa...

arxiv.org

Pleased to share new work with @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social & undergrad interns at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA. Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models www.arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15987 🧵1/n

Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2026! The Coupled Minds Lab at @tamu.bsky.social will use a multimodal approach combining fMRI hyperscanning, computational modeling, and natural language processing to study how conversations transform minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io Due Date Dec 1

CogNeuroLanguage: new by @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @jeanremiking.bsky.social (w Alec Marantz & me) shows how the brain maintains-updates continuously unfolding lang hierarchy during comprehension, anchoring ling theories to biological implementation www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #neuroskyence

Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the human brain | PNAS

Speech comprehension involves transforming an acoustic waveform into meaning. To do so, the human brain generates a hierarchy of features that conv...

pnas.org

Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory

How does the brain access stored knowledge? It has been proposed that conceptual search engages neurocognitive processes similar to foraging in physical space. We tested this idea using intracranial E...

biorxiv.org

just finished steve levinson's new book! it's a beautifully articulated argument for social interaction as the evolutionary niche which made language possible, rather than the other way around. progress in linguistics depends on a stronger science of interaction. www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

The Interaction Engine

Cambridge Core - Semantics and Pragmatics - The Interaction Engine

cambridge.org

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.

Mark Thornton@markthornton.bsky.social · 11mo ago

The psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

Paper and R package for (more flexible) power analysis in multilevel: psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets! We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it! 1/

neurotaha@neurotaha.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚨 Paper alert: To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models 📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091... 🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io

@falklab.bsky.social wrote a nice summary of our hyperscanning work on how people form social connection and find agreement through conversation: www.scientificamerican.com/article/good...

Good Conversations Don’t Require Everybody to Agree, Neuroscience Shows

Brain imaging is illuminating the patterns linked to productive, positive dialogue, and those insights could help people connect with others

scientificamerican.com

Finally published: “Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition” www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... An information-theoretic framework to analyse complex multivariate dynamical processes ✨

Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition | PNAS

Our ability to understand and control complex systems of many interacting parts remains limited. A key challenge is that we still do not know how b...

pnas.org

“As AI tools become more capable, funding agencies and institutions may question why labs need dedicated computational staff. But these examples suggest the roles will become more important, not less”

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 12mo ago

With LLMs, researchers can develop software entirely through natural language conversations. This shift is transforming how research gets done, offering new opportunities and new challenges, writes ‪Benjamin Dichter. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

📢Out now! @jixingli.bsky.social, @lamb-cityuhk.bsky.social and colleagues assess whether instruction tuning can enhance LLM's ability to capture linguistic information in the human brain. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #compneuro #ArtificialIntelligence

Increasing alignment of large language models with language processing in the human brain - Nature Computational Science

Larger LLMs’ self-attention more accurately predicts readers’ regressive saccades and fMRI responses in language regions, whereas instruction tuning adds no benefit.

nature.com

New Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below

How to compute surprisal (Shannon Information) for every word in your language sample. Then --- correlate surprisal with other major lexical-semantic variables (concreteness, semantic neighborhoods, freq). reilly-lab.github.io/Surprisal.html

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers. My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers. We found 437 of them. Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...