Mark Thornton
Social neuroscientist studying how people understand and predict each other. Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. http://markallenthornton.com
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonThe Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonGreat piece on prioritizing quality over quantity in scientific publication. For those of us with labs, this necessarily involves shrinking our group size. After I got tenure I started to downsize my lab and have not regretted it one iota. More time for each student & more time to think & write.
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonProject Implicit is facing an existential threat. After almost 30 years, 60 million visitors, and hundreds of published papers, funding for our work has disappeared. We’ve never held a fundraising drive before, but we need your support to keep our site running. Please consider donating! 🙏
- Project Implicit is a research nonprofit behind tools millions use to understand bias. Like many public science orgs, sustaining this work has become increasingly difficult. We are at risk of closing without additional support. Help protect this impt work by donating here: 4agc.com/donate/impli...
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonOur new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonNew 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.
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonNew preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonOfficially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonNew perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonDelighted 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.
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- Reposted by Mark ThorntonOur paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...
- Another ~monthly update on the state of the #psychjobs market: more jobs continue to trickle in, though at a decreasing pace. We've nearly hit parity with covid in absolute terms, although the prior year baseline was higher this year than that, so we still see a slightly larger relative decrease.
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- Reposted by Mark ThorntonWhy do brain networks vary? Do these differences shape behavior? If every 🧠 is unique, how can we detect common features of brain organization? @rodbraga.bsky.social and I dig in, in @annualreviews.bsky.social (ahead of print): go.illinois.edu/Gratton2025-... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #MedSky 🧵👇
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- Reposted by Mark ThorntonHow do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonOne of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab! We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!
- Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw
- Reposted by Mark Thornton📣 New preprint from the Braga Lab! 📣 The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network Congrats to Dr. Joe Salvo for this epic set of results Big Q: What brain systems support the translation of writing to concepts and meaning? Thread 🧵 ⬇️
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonNew paper in Open Mind, with @emmayu23.bsky.social, Megan Richardson, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that by 6 years of age, children think that close friends know the content of each other’s minds. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... @openmindjournal.bsky.social
- AI jobs currently make up ~4% of posts on the psych job wiki. If you throw in "computational" and "data" (science), that goes up to 9% For comparison, the median size of the content areas (e.g., clinical, social, cognitive, etc.) is typically around 6-8%.
- 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.
- 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
- Comparing this year and covid to the years preceding each, this year currently represents a 1.5x larger drop. There are likely to still be some late job postings (more so than in previous years) but at this point we're sitting at 37% of last year's total.
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonI’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...
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- 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... 🧵👇
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- Reposted by Mark Thorntoncondemnations of political violence are well taken but it does feel as if some prominent political commentators are of the view that violence isn’t a part of the history of American politics and that is very much not true.
- Reposted by Mark Thornton🚨 New paper alert! (slightly belated) We (with @joshcjackson.bsky.social) suggest that complex technologies, as they need several (often many) people to use them, require innovations that distribute cognition to help regulate cognitive load and coordinate. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonHow might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Today, SCRAP Lab returned (right) to the Path of Life Garden in Windsor, VT - the site of our first in-person get-together as a lab 5 years ago (left) - to welcome our newest member, graduate student @gabefajardo.bsky.social!
- 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
- (Note that if you go to the wiki sites.google.com/view/psychjo... and just start counting, you'll get different numbers than this graph implies unless you account for cross-listing across areas and ranks. I did this by dividing each post by the number of places it is cross-listed.)
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonPsyArXiv is now down to only ~40% of the backlog we started with, thanks to our amazing moderators 🎉 To all mods: thank you so much for your hard work! Did one of your preprints get approved recently? Help us show our thanks by liking and sharing this post :) #PsyArXiv #PsychSciSky
- 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...
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonQuantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that! Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonSo excited to share that my first first-author paper is out in @commspsychol.nature.com 🎉 In a mini-meta analysis of seven studies, we looked at whether loneliness is related to altered expectations of one’s own and others' emotion transitions. www.nature.com/articles/s44... (1/4)
- I haven't been doing much astrophotography for the last year or so because the deck I use for it had become unsafe. But it's repaired now, so I'm back at it! I think this is the best shot of Andromeda that I've managed to date!
- Reposted by Mark ThorntonNew job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!
