/5 Very thankful for the creative feedback and teamwork from Derek Lilienthal, @coralineiordan.bsky.social, @aaronstevenwhite.io, and @elisepiazza.bsky.social throughout this wonderful endeavor! 🙏
/4 Expert ratings were also more independent of fine-grained linguistic & structural features of stories (e.g., word surprisal, semantic similarity between sentences). Our findings suggest that experts may use different, potentially more gist-like, mechanisms when judging stories.
/3 When rating stories across 5 dimensions (creativity, imagination, novelty, complexity, cohesiveness), experts and novices shared a 2-dimensional latent story space represented by creativity & cohesiveness, but experts viewed relationships between story dimensions as more nuanced and independent.
/2 Then, we asked novices and creative writing experts to rate the stories on multiple dimensions and analyzed a) the structure of their rating spaces and b) the extent to which different linguistic features predicted different story dimensions.
/1 New preprint alert! 💫“Expertise Shapes the Multidimensional Perception of Stories”! 💫 We generated a novel corpus of improvised spoken stories using diverse prompts designed to elicit creative and complex narrative structure.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
The SoNIC Lab is in San Francisco for #CogSci2025; come check out our latest research!
For the first time, metalinguistics and recursion are not exclusively human abilities. Large language models can do them too.
This research is an example of “behavioral interpretability” of LLMs—using prompting to understand inner representations of AI.
news.berkeley.edu/2025/07/14/a...
Interpersonal Cardiac Synchrony During Emotional Sharing Between Strangers: https://osf.io/nmj5k
Hands holding a copy of "Natural Neuroscience: Toward a System Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors" by Nachum Ulanovsky. Along the bottom of the cover is a skyline of trees. In the background and center, a faint drawing of the brain from a birds eye view.
"Ideally, it will not only inspire neuroscientists to make their studies more 'natural' but also encourage behavioral ecologists to tackle the neural basis of fascinating behaviors."
@science.org reviews "Natural Neuroscience" by Nachum Ulanovsky: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Scream Club Chicago offers a safe release of bottled-up energy in weekly sessions by the lake. The breath-work practitioner says the exercise helps externalize internal tensions.
https://trib.al/ZWVNpjv
New mewsletter out today: what using catspeak says about us 🧪 #linguistics open.substack.com/pub/purrspec...
The PEER2025 schedule is up! 👇
So grateful for the recognition and support!
Excited to be part of this work led by @hayoungsong.bsky.social! We used scrambled narratives, fMRI, and free-form verbal responses to study how the brain arrives at insights!
Excited to share our new preprint! Using a narrative reading paradigm, we showed that temporal order memory reconstruction can depend on multiple sources of information - factors like knowledge about typical event order and hierarchical event structure can both play important roles! 📖🧠
Now out in Plos Computational Biology! We identified a generalizable neural signature of emotional arousal across contexts and individuals during movie watching.
work with the best team: @hayoungsong.bsky.social @Zihan Bai @monicarosenb.bsky.social @ycleong.bsky.social
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
Calling all couples in the Chicago area! 💕 I'm launching a new study with @ycleong.bsky.social and @lydiaemery.bsky.social to explore brain responses during conversations between couples. If you're interested, please fill out our brief screener! ssd.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
New preprint 🎉: How do episodic memory, emotions, and schemas for caregiver experiences come together in kids’ brains and verbal recall? Check out our new results showing how past and present childhood experiences shape perception and memory for movies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Very proud to finally share our latest paper "Person Knowledge is Independently Encoded by Allocentric and Egocentric Reference Frames within Separate Brain Systems," officially out at Psych Science.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Join us on May 21 for AI, Creativity & a Changing World, a special symposium on the latest in Creativity & AI research:
🔹 AI & Human Co-Creativity
🔹 Advances in Automated Creativity Scoring
🔹 Expert panel on future trends led by @roger-beaty.bsky.social
Registration opens next week!
#SfNC2025
Enhancing creativity through neurofeedback:
Check out our recent paper where we use covert neurofeedback to entrain default-executive coupling during creative thinking!
Xinbing (Jack) Zhang, Jack White, Michael Luehrs, Michal Ramot, & @roger-beaty.bsky.social
t.co/glnpPNmJ6R
New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
List of psychology-related starter packs!
#Psychology #AcademicSky 🧪 🧵
Cross-Cultural Psychology and Quant Anthropology
by @drboothroyd.bsky.social
Excited to attend my first in-person conference since the pandemic! Stop by my poster (5097) to chat about speech, prosody, and social interactions. And don’t miss the other amazing posters from my lab too! #psynom24
Our lab has a new #musiccognition preprint out! This is a comprehensive look at how listeners integrate musical context across multiple timescales to complete a diverse array of tasks: memory, prediction, and event segmentation. osf.io/preprints/ps...
🙋🏻♀️
