iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Mark Thornton

David Colaço @davidcolaco.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The complete version of @phaueis.eurosky.social and my BBS target article, "Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling," is now available. It includes 32 commentaries and our response. Please share #philsci #philsky #cogsci

cambridge.org

Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling - Volume 49

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SANS @sansmeeting.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Exciting news! SANS has received an R13 from the National Institute for Aging at NIH! It will provide support for trainee travel and programming focused on aging at the SANS Annual Meeting as detailed below:

SANS has received an R13 Conference Grant from the National Institute on Aging at NIH (1R13AG104345-01; PI/MPI Fareri/Satpute) that provides support for trainee travel and programming focused on aging at the SANS Annual Meeting as detailed below:

New Travel Awards for Trainees: Travel awards are available for trainees who are interested in learning more about aging and lifespan research. Specifically, 15 awards in the amount of $1,300/award will be available for the 2027 conference. You do not need to currently study aging to be eligible—curiosity is enough! If you are interested in how aging might intersect with your current or future work, we strongly encourage you to apply. Trainees receiving these awards will participate in dedicated opportunities to engage with experts in aging research, including networking and mentoring activities during the conference and follow-up activities after the meeting. Additional details and requirements will follow and will also be specified in the abstract submission portal.

Special Symposium on Aging: The 2027 SANS Conference in Montreal on April 7-10, 2027, will feature a symposium highlighting aging and lifespan research in social and affective neuroscience and other aging-oriented programming. We encourage researchers working in this area to submit posters or talks. Submissions may also be considered for presentation in the special symposium.

We hope you are excited about the potential for this award to stimulate new research and scientific discussion among the SANS community. See you in April in Montreal!

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Absolutely! Common pipelines like fMRIprep - although not perfect for all purposes - have done wonders for social/cog neuro, and I think that if we can move towards those faster in this research area it will save us from a lot of false starts and wasted/reduplicated effort.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

... and yet we have to pretend that they are, so we can't embrace the messiness of reality (and frankly, touch grass) to the extent of the qualitative fields which have been studying social interaction for a long time, or build the rich theoretical frameworks they use as lenses.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Haha, thanks! And yes, I completely agree. I think we're currently in an unhappy medium in social psych/neuro, where we insist on theory-driven research, but our verbal theories aren't good enough to make precise predictions or be falsified most of the time...

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Can we learn from our mistakes? Probably not, but damned if I stop trying! 🤪

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

....and in part because I think it's useful for (certain parts) of the field to think about more about measurement in terms other than individual differences. But there are also so many insidious new types of confound & other problems in these data! It's like the early days of fMRI all over again.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

💯 Oh, you both know I'm going to cover the hell of that kind of thing! I'm really excited to do so, as well, in part because the SNR for some of this stuff (though not all) is crazy high compared to what we have to put up with in social/cog neuro...

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

What would you want to see in a textbook (free, online, jupyter/marimo style) about quantitative/computational approaches for analyzing naturalistic social interactions (e.g., face-to-face conversations)? I'm in the early phases of drafting one and would value external input on its audience's needs.

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Reposted by Mark Thornton

Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Our latest paper led by Taylor Guthrie with former undergrad RA Aussie Frost. We show that multivariate fMRI signals can decode the identity of specific individuals within the DMN and in the absence of visual features or other lower-level sensory information. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I think the option to look at the full manuscript before agreeing to review is increasingly important. Some journals already offer this, the rest should start. If I can tell from a glance that a paper is chock full of slop, I'm going to say no. Human reviews should be reserved for human authors.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I don't, and won't, use AI to review papers for me - for both principled and practical reasons. But ultimately that means my capacity is limited, and I will have to be more selective in the reviews I agree to do as volume increases.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

There are still 3 months left in 2026, and I have already reviewed significantly more papers than in any past calendar year. Yet simultaneously I have had to decline more review requests than ever. Not saying it's all AI's fault, but I have encountered some very blatant and counterproductive uses.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Congratulations, this is how they choose future laureates! It's a sword in the stone situation: only those who park in these spots unticketed are worthy.

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wimpouw @wimpouw.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Here we go! We can finally share what Sharjeel Shaikh @sharjeelshaikh has been leading the work on with us! Consider participating in our detection challenge

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SANS @sansmeeting.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Symposium submissions are now open for #SANS2027! Submissions must be made through the online submission portal by 23:59 (Eastern Time) on Tuesday, October 13, 2026. More details here: socialaffectiveneuro.org/symposia-sub...

socialaffectiveneuro.org

Symposia Submission - Social Affective Neuroscience Society

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

But don't waste your life paralyzed by anxiety. And don't let tech bros who haven't even finished the novels they name their crap after convince you that they are prophets.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

At the moment, only citation-derived metrics are really aggregated and scored, broadly speaking. The CRediT taxonomy, flawed as it is, might be better/complementary, but no aggregate metrics for it are computed, so it's barely more accessible to assessors than just reading papers.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

For a lot of these, I feel like the issue isn't the metric (they're all imperfect, but in different ways) but rather the lack of aggregation. That is, if we're using quantative metrics at all (which maybe we shouldn't) then we should at least aggregate them.

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Reposted by Mark Thornton

Benedek Kurdi @benedek.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

🚀 Project Implicit’s critical work continues! Our website remains fully operational 24/7, collecting data and launching new studies. We are finalizing a new organizational structure to carry our research and educational mission forward. Thank you to our global community. ➡️ implicit.harvard.edu

September 17, 2026
Project Implicit Continues its Critical Work
We are more excited than ever to not only continue but to expand the scientific collabora-tion at the heart of Project Implicit. With the non-profit that served as our operational home for two decades shutting down, a new organizational structure is being finalized to carry our research and educational mission forward.
In the meantime, the Project Implicit website (http://implicit.harvard.edu/) remains fully operational and continues to collect data 24/7. New studies, programs, and educational ef-forts are actively underway. We expect public data to remain available in perpetuity, and new data from 2026 will be released in January of next year.
We express our deep gratitude to everyone who has helped create, sustain, and grow Pro-ject Implicit. This includes the founders, members of the Board of Directors and the Scien-tific Advisory Board, staff members of the non-profit, international collaborators, and the students across dozens of labs tending to tasks big and small. We are also thankful to our generous donors who have answered our calls and supported our mission, and especially the millions of annual visitors who continue to honor us with their curiosity, time, and data.
We look forward to providing more details in the weeks ahead.
Jordan Axt, McGill University
Yoav Bar-Anan, Tel-Aviv University
Benedek Kurdi, University of Illinois
Calvin Lai, Rutgers University
Ryan Lei, Haverford College
Curtis Phills, University of Oregon
Kate Ratliff, University of Waterloo
Colin Tucker Smith, Wilfrid Laurier University
Jennifer Steele, York University
Heidi Vuletich, University of Denver

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Reposted by Mark Thornton

Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

1/ How do we sustain mental continuity in the face of interruption? @xianl-explorer.bsky.social found that, while people listen to a story, posterior medial cortex expresses a slowly evolving "background" representation of the story's context, which survived through silence and interfering tasks.

A schematic figure showing an evolving timeline of mental context during an interrupted narrative.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Perhaps a bit outside of psychology, but clustering as part of computational approaches to animal behavior (e.g., royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article... and www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...) seem robust, meaningful, and useful. My lab is adapting them to study naturalistic human social interactions.

pnas.org

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...

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

@eikofried.bsky.social - do you know if Academic Transfer, or any other similar European jobs site, compiles and shares statistics from year to year? It could be quite interesting to compare with the US wiki data (e.g. to estimate the relative effects of '08, Covid, Trump's attacks on US higher ed).

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Yeah, I wish we had a centralized job website with institutional support! I'm very grateful to the folks who volunteer their time running the wiki, but at the same time, scraping it to put these numbers together is challenging, and there are many features that are hard to quantify accurately.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I hope these data can still be useful to you - even if you're not from the US or Canada and not on the US/Canadian market - both because I haven't seen data like these complied from other markets, and because the US is a very large market that affects the global market.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Yes sorry for the lack of clarity if you're outside the US! I usually specify the data source as the psych job wiki in the image itself (e.g. bsky.app/profile/mark...) but I realize now, while putting this together in a hurry, I accidently bumped that off screen while adjusting the legend this time.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Those posts have gotten a lot of traction each year, so I figured most people who cared would know where these numbers came from by now.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Yeah, sorry for not posting the provenance. To be fair, I have been collating and posting these numbers for 8 years, and have generally provided more details on my methods/data sources until recently.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Ah, my bad about the links - copy and paste failure

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The wikis are used internationally, and there are non-US jobs on there, but I can't speak to exact coverage by country, because as far as I'm aware there are no authoritative numbers available. My guess is a skew toward US/anglo-sphere.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Why do you say that? These numbers are derived from scraping both the old psych job wiki (psychjobsearch.wikidot.com) and more recently the new one (psychjobsearch.wikidot.com). The methodology is described on my blog (markallenthornton.com/blog/psychjo...).

markallenthornton.com

Insights About the Job Market from the PsychJobSearch Wiki

Scraping and analyzing eight years of job postings

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Reposted by Mark Thornton

Jonathan Peelle @jpeelle.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

"I like milk and sugar in my _______" Classic work on prediction has used violation paradigms to study context and prediction. New work from my lab, led by Ryan O'Leary, compares semantic distance and GPT-2 surprisal in natural speech. #neuroscienceoflanguage www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

Neural tracking of surprisal and semantic distance in naturalistic movie viewing

Understanding speech requires listeners to integrate incoming input with prior linguistic and thematic knowledge to access meaning, a task greatly aided by prediction. Surprisal and related phenomena ...

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

There's no color for it because I rely on the wiki's categories (with some cross-year harmonization choices by me) for these counts, and there's no exclusively AI category. However, the rough estimates I've made suggest 5-12% of all psych jobs are AI-focused this year.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Yes, a 26% drop relative to the pervious year: bsky.app/profile/mark... And no, these figures don't account for cancelled or failed searches because the wiki doesn't reliably report those, so they should be taken as an upper bound on the number of people actually hired into TT jobs.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Only time will tell if this is a genuine increase over last year, or if the market is just earlier this year than last year. Last year's market was by all accounts substantially delayed relative to the usual timeline, with many more jobs appearing well into late winter / early spring.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

The psychology job market may be showing some early signs of regaining strength, relative to last year. A week ago last year, fewer than 200 jobs had been listed - today, it is nearly 300, a figure we didn't hit till early October in '25. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

Bar graph showing the number of academic jobs in psychology by area over the years from 2007-2026.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Come join @elisabaek.bsky.social & me on the SANS social media committee!

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SANS @sansmeeting.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Interested in becoming a social and affective neuroscience influencer? SANS will soon be launching a new media initiative, in which we make short-form video content to reach a wider audience. If you're interested in joining this initative, please DM us here or email sans.media.chair@gmail.com!

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Reposted by Mark Thornton

jerrytang.bsky.social @jerrytang.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Our new study on cross-participant cortical mapping (with @alexanderhuth.bsky.social) is out in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social! direct.mit.edu/imag/article... 1/7

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Context Lab @contextlab.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

In our latest study, led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social, we build a geometric framework to ask how our memories change with the passage of time ⏰ Title: Delayed recountings preserve but simplify the semantic geometry of earlier recountings Preprint: osf.io/mhxtd_v1 Code/data: github.com/ContextLab/m... 🧵

osf.io

OSF

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LT @lindseytepfer.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

We don’t just lock on to our first impression of someone and call it a day. Instead, we regularly revise our appraisals as we learn more about them. But *how* do our brains make this process possible? Check out this fresh pre-print to see how we went about answering this question!

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Data & code avaliable here: osf.io/pnyut/overview

osf.io

OSF

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Whether we're forming impressions of politicians, celebrities, or friends, our ability to change our minds about other people, given appropriate new information, is a critical social cognitive and moral capacity. This work brings us closer to understanding how our brains make it possible.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Neuroscientifically, these results also highlight the importance of the superior temporal sulcus in trait impression updating. This region was implicated by all of the putative mechanisms we found evidence for, and is also the main place where part of the trait-brain assocation remains unexplained.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

They also show that there is more to explain! Because even together the mechanisms we investigate here only partially mediated the relationship between neural reponses and trait ratings.

Neural encoding of trait impression updating. Brain regions within which pattern similarity is correlated with rated trait similarity of target people as participants watch SEND videos. Panels illustrate A) zero-order associations, B) residual associations after controlling for face, voice, and semantic modalities, and C) residual associations controlling for these modalities plus computational operations of compression, fusion, integration, and prediction. Results are significant (p < .05) corrected for multiple comparisons across parcels via maximal statistic permutation testing.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Together, these results show how multiple mechanism - perceptual, computational, and individual difference - contribute to shape how we change our minds about other people when presented with rich naturalistic stimuli.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

We also found that all four of sets of individual differences predicted intersubject correlation in brain responses. However, only one of these set of differences - participants' explicit attitudes towards age, race, and gender social groups - statistically mediated the trait-brain relationship.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

At the individual difference level, we found several regions within which differences in intersubject correlation were correlated with individual differences in trait updating.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

We also found evidence that 3/4 of the computational operations we investigated (all but prediction) generated representations that uniquely explained brain activity over and above the perceptual modalities. However only one, compression, uniquely statistically mediated the trait-brain relationship.

Computational operations of trait impression updating. The left column illustrates brain regions within which pattern similarity is uniquely associated with representations learned by neural networks trained to engage in the corresponding computational operation: compression, multimodal fusion, temporal integration, or prediction. The right column illustrates where these effects uniquely statistically mediate the association between brain activity and trait ratings. All results control for the raw annotations of face, voice quality, and speech semantics. Results are significant (p < .05) corrected for multiple comparisons across parcels via maximal statistic permutation testing.

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