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dartmouthpbs.bsky.social
Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
@dartmouthpbs.bsky.social
330 followers 41 following 13 posts
Official account of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Follow for research, learning resources, events, news, and job postings.
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yonghoonchung.bsky.social
New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/
OSF
osf.io
February 9, 2026 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
markthornton.bsky.social
New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.
Figure 1. Experimental stimuli and paradigm. 1A. Manipulation timeline. Each video features a total of 12 IM moments, half of which were silenced in version 1, and the other half silenced in version 2. This produces two versions of each video where only half of the IMs are audible to the participant. 1B. Voice removal. Background sounds were preserved in both versions, regardless of IM presence. 1C. fMRI paradigm. Participants were randomly assigned a version and watched both videos in a counter-balanced order. 1D. Afterwards, they made trait ratings on each video’s main character in random order before rating them on subsequent traits. Figure 2. Scanner and online participant trait rating results. A. Scanner participants arrive at similar conclusions about characters across versions by the end of each video. B. Trait ratings at the end of the videos are correlated between online and scanner participants. C. The IM manipulation had a significant effect on the trait ratings across the duration of the videos, such that different versions led to different trait impressions. D. Participants who saw different versions changed their ratings for both clip types but changed to a greater degree after seeing the IM segments relative to the NIM. Figure 3. ISC results. Gaining access to the same mental state knowledge in earlier IM clips led to significantly (p < .05, corrected) more aligned neural activity in subsequent NIM clips across a wide swath of the temporal lobe, as well as the frontal pole and SPL. Figure 4. Representational similarity analysis results. 4A. RSA pipeline. Clip-specific patterns of brain activity were correlated across movies within segment type (NIM or IM) to create a correlation distance matrix for each participant. Corresponding trait ratings were partitioned into components specific to each of the two versions of each film or shared across both versions. RDMs based on those traits were used to predict the neural RDMs. The resulting coefficients were sorted into matched (version), unmatched (version), and shared across version, and inference was performed via t-tests across participants. See methods section for further details of this analysis. 4B. Prior trait rating results. 1. While watching IM clips of the same version, the prior trait ratings predict activity in the bilateral A1, STS, STG, and right VLPFC. 2. Prior trait rating predicts activity in these regions again in the same-version NIM clips. 3. Across the two versions, while watching the NIM clips, the prior trait ratings predicted activity in the right occipitotemporal cortex. 4C. Trait updating results. 1. While watching NIM clips, the right STS & MTG predict version-matched trait updating. 2. In the unmatched NIM clips, STS & MTG again predict trait updating. 3. Across the two versions, the precuneus and LOC show pattern similarity for trait updating in participants.
February 11, 2026 at 8:26 PM
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dartmouthartsci.bsky.social
.@dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor @stolkarjen.bsky.social's latest research highlights why individualized communication approaches are crucial, with insights that could improve understanding of autism.
Meeting People as Individuals, Not Assumptions
Why communication depends on updating our assumptions about others.
www.psychologytoday.com
February 5, 2026 at 8:10 PM
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dartmouthartsci.bsky.social
Congrats to @dartmouthpbs.bsky.social professor Tor Wager, who received the Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences from @nasonline.org. The prize recognizes Wager's pioneering research on the mind-body connection and innovative neuroimaging approaches. https://bit.ly/4k0glSM
Photo of Tor Wager with overlaid text, “Tor Wager, Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience. Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.”
January 26, 2026 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
jeremyrmanning.bsky.social
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.
Models of Language and Communication - PSYC 51.17
Course materials for PSYC 51.17: Language Models from Scratch - Dartmouth College
context-lab.com
January 7, 2026 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
jeremyrmanning.bsky.social
I made a quirky little web app to help guide your lucid dreams: context-lab.com/dream-stream/

It's kind of like a "netflix" or "spotify" for lucid dreaming-- you select different narratives to form a playlist, and then it uses your device's microphone to start playing when it detects you're in REM.
context-lab.com
January 11, 2026 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
katenautiyal.bsky.social
🧠 Why it matters 🧠
-The results challenge a prevailing view that 5‑HT2A activation alone drives psilocybin’s therapeutic actions.
-Highlights the importance of polypharmacology 🥳, and points to the 1B receptor as a target for non‑hallucinogenic antidepressant and anxiolytic pharmacotherapies.
katenautiyal.bsky.social Kate Nautiyal @katenautiyal.bsky.social · Dec 21
New paper drop! 🧠💊 Our new paper out in Molecular Psychiatry shows that the serotonin 1B receptor is important for the neural and antidepressant/anxiolytic behavioral responses to psilocybin in mice.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The serotonin 1B receptor is required for some of the behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice - Molecular Psychiatry
Molecular Psychiatry - The serotonin 1B receptor is required for some of the behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice
www.nature.com
December 21, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
katenautiyal.bsky.social
New paper drop! 🧠💊 Our new paper out in Molecular Psychiatry shows that the serotonin 1B receptor is important for the neural and antidepressant/anxiolytic behavioral responses to psilocybin in mice.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The serotonin 1B receptor is required for some of the behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice - Molecular Psychiatry
Molecular Psychiatry - The serotonin 1B receptor is required for some of the behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice
www.nature.com
December 21, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
contextlab.bsky.social
Remember when grinding leetcode was still a thing? If you'd like to hone your coding skills, or even just return to that simpler time for nostalgia's sake, you might enjoy this project from our group: github.com/ContextLab/l...

Happy hacking! 👩‍💻
GitHub - ContextLab/leetcode-solutions: Leetcode discussions, brainstorming, musings, and solutions
Leetcode discussions, brainstorming, musings, and solutions - ContextLab/leetcode-solutions
github.com
November 6, 2025 at 1:42 PM
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katenautiyal.bsky.social
Hope to see all of the serotonin enthusiasts at the ISSR mixer at SfN on Monday (people who find dopamine rewarding are welcome too). register here: pci.jotform.com/form/2528274...
November 12, 2025 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
contextlab.bsky.social
🚨 New preprint alert!

We use trained-from-scratch GPT-2 models to characterize & capture the unique writing styles of individual authors. We also develop a new LLM-based relative stylometric measure.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.21958
Code/data: github.com/ContextLab/l...
🤗: huggingface.co/contextlab
A plot showing a 3D projection of 8 "authors" (each represented with a differently colored and labeled dot). Stylistic distances between authors are reflected by spatial distances in the plot.
October 28, 2025 at 4:28 AM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
jsphillips.bsky.social
We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/
Cognitive Science Graduate Admissions – Information about graduate admissions from the cognitive science faculty
sites.dartmouth.edu
October 23, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
gabefajardo.bsky.social
I’m excited to share my 1st first-authored paper, “Distinct portions of superior temporal sulcus combine auditory representations with different visual streams” (with @mtfang.bsky.social and @steanze.bsky.social ), now out in The Journal of Neuroscience!
www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
Fig. 1. a. Visual and auditory regions of interest (ROIs). b. Responses in a combination of visual (e.g., early dorsal visual stream; Fig. 1a, middle panel) and auditory regions were used to predict responses in the rest of the brain using MVPN. c. In order to identify brain regions that combine responses from auditory and visual regions, we identified voxels where predictions generated using the combined patterns from auditory regions and one set of visual regions jointly (as shown in Fig. 1b) are significantly more accurate than predictions generated using only auditory regions or only that set of visual regions.
October 2, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
landrybulls.bsky.social
Excited to share the preprint for my 1st 1st-author manuscript! @markthornton.bsky.social and I show that people hold robust, structured beliefs about how individual mental states unfold in intensity over time. We find that these beliefs are reflected in other domains of mental state understanding.
September 16, 2025 at 2:46 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
markthornton.bsky.social
Very excited to share @landrybulls.bsky.social's 1st lead-author preprint in my lab! Using datasets from MySocialBrain.org we measured people's beliefs about how mental states change in intensity over time, the dimensional structure of those beliefs, and their correlates: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵👇
September 16, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
markthornton.bsky.social
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. 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. Effect of confound effect size on true positive rates for task effects under FDR correction. Colors indicate sample sizes: N = 25 in blue, N = 50 in green, and N = 100 in orange. Effect sizes are reflected by the darkness of each color, with light shades representing d = .2, medium d = .5, and dark d = .8. The task brain maps and confound brain maps referenced in each panel are shown in Figure 3. 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).
August 29, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
markthornton.bsky.social
New paper from me at Cognition and Emotion! "Deep neural network models of emotion understanding" I discuss how deep nets can be used as cognitive models of emotion perception, prediction, and regulation: doi.org/10.1080/0269...

(h/t @ltjaql.bsky.social for the illustrations!)
August 7, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
mimijanssen.bsky.social
Hung-tu Chen, Nicolas Tritsch, Matt van der Meer, and I have submitted a new preprint (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) in which we use simultaneous hippocampal ephys and ventral striatal (VS) fiber photometry to establish a link between sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) and VS dopamine (DA) in mice. (1/9)
Ventral Striatal Dopamine Increases following Hippocampal Sharp-Wave Ripples
Leading theories suggest that hippocampal replay drives offline learning through coupling with an internal teaching signal such as ventral striatal dopamine (DA); however, the relationship between hip...
www.biorxiv.org
August 4, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
jeremyrmanning.bsky.social
I'm starting to work on a new library, "clustrix" (
clustrix.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to ease switching between local vs. remote execution in Python scripts, notebooks, etc. This has been a pain point for my group for a while!
Clustrix Documentation — Clustrix Documentation
clustrix.readthedocs.io
June 30, 2025 at 4:47 AM
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emmatempleton.bsky.social
Next summer I will start as an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I couldn't be more excited! 1/
Jason and I wearing Chicago Booth swag, inadvertently looking like new MBA students. We are smiling and celebrating at a restaurant!
June 30, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences
contextlab.bsky.social
🤠 New release announcement for our datawrangler package! Try it using:

pip install --upgrade pydata-wrangler

Lots of awesome performance improvements (including native polars support!), simplified API, support for @hf.co text embeddings, etc. More info here: data-wrangler.readthedocs.org
DataWrangler — datawrangler 0.4.0 documentation
data-wrangler.readthedocs.org
June 14, 2025 at 12:10 PM
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ericastownsend.bsky.social
well its officially official - I graduated yesterday! 🎓 super honored to have also received my department’s promise award in brain science research. pumped to start my postdoc next month!!
June 15, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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larakirfel.bsky.social
🏔️ Brad is lost in the wilderness—but doesn’t know there’s a town nearby. Was he forced to stay put?

In our #CogSci2025 paper, we show that judgments of what’s possible—and whether someone had to act—depend on what agents know.

📰 osf.io/preprints/ps...

w/ Matt Mandelkern & @jsphillips.bsky.social
Title: Representations of what’s possible reflect others’ epistemic states Authors: Lara Kirfel, Matthew Mandelkern, and Jonathan Scott Phillips Abstract: People’s judgments about what an agent can do are shaped by various constraints, including probability, morality, and normality. However, little is known about how these representations of possible actions—what we call modal space representations—are influenced by an agent’s knowledge of their environment. Across two studies, we investigated whether epistemic constraints systematically shift modal space representations and whether these shifts affect high-level force judgments. Study 1 replicated prior findings that the first actions that come to mind are perceived as the most probable, moral, and normal, and demonstrated that these constraints apply regardless of an agent’s epistemic state. Study 2 showed that limiting an agent’s knowledge changes which actions people perceive to be available for the agent, which in turn affects whether people judged an agent as being “forced” to take a particular action. These findings highlight the role of Theory of Mind in modal cognition, revealing how epistemic constraints shape perceptions of possibilities.
May 16, 2025 at 12:04 PM
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violastoermer.bsky.social
Excited to see everyone at #VSS2025 - Come check out what my lab has been up to over this past year:
May 16, 2025 at 4:05 PM
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esfinn.bsky.social
Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.
May 9, 2025 at 7:01 PM