Mark Thornton

@markthornton.bsky.social

2167 Followers 737 Following

Social neuroscientist studying how people understand and predict each other. Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. http://markallenthornton.com

Me & Lindsey
Prioritize correctness, specificity, and depth over brevity when the topic is complex; concise direct answers for factual questions. Avoid generic "best practice" advice unless contextualized and justified mechanistically. Prefer structured reasoning, explicit comparisons, and concrete examples over vague summaries. Assume interest in mechanistic understanding, not just operational instructions. Optimize for intellectual usefulness rather than conversational friendliness. No patronizing reassurance, excessive enthusiasm, or therapy-style language. Avoid filler phrases: "great question," "it depends" without elaboration, "here's the thing," motivational framing, or generic AI-assistant hedging.
Effect of confound mass on true positive rates under test-wise FDR correction in completely arbitrary data. Confound mass represents how large a confound is in terms of the product of the number of tests it is present in, and its mean effect size across these tests. Results are shown at differing combinations of true effect size, number of tests with true (i.e., non-confound) effects, and sample size.
Two humans smiling, one holding up a ringed hand
A bar chart reflecting the number of psychology jobs per year from 2007-2025 by area.
Bar graph showing tenure track psychology jobs posted each year since 2010 broken up by area.
Dad with me as a baby
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.
Original members of SCRAP Lab
Bar plot showing the number of psychology jobs posted each year by area. There are major dips in 2020 due to covid, and in 2025 (now).
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.
Photo of Andromeda galaxy
Coffee berries
a, Three behavioural tasks and their corresponding categories (via UMAP and k-means clustering). The dimensional survey indicated three high-order categories (hostile, private and public, abbreviated as HPP), whereas both cognitive tasks identified six canonical relationship types. b, Text analysis on categorical labels in the free sorting task revealed the label hierarchy: the hierarchical clustering algorithm first derived three HPP categories; next, the ‘public’ cluster was further split into ‘transactional’ and ‘power’, and the ‘private’ cluster was subdivided into ‘family’, ‘romantic’ and ‘affiliative’. The word clouds in the treemap display label names in each cluster. The radar plots illustrate the average scores on the FAVEE dimensions across relationships in each category. c, A dimension–category hybrid model was evaluated by applying k-means clustering to the 5D FAVEE embedding space. Three HPP clusters were found, suggesting that HPP could emerge from the FAVEE space. d, The three building blocks of the relationship concept system and their internal associations. The flow chart illustrates how people represent relationships via the joint framework of dimensions and categories. Five FAVEE dimensions can be understood as filters (for example, all relationships can be filtered into hostile and solidarity relationships via the valence dimension), and relationship categories are formed by uneven distributions projected on dimensions (see the details in Supplementary Fig. 14). Our data suggest that six canonical relationship types (in the grey circles) originate from three HPP categories (in the dashed circles), which inherently emerge from the 5D FAVEE space (arrows).
Figure showing causal effects of manipulating face-traits on attributed mental states in situations.
Stimulus sampling diagram.
Daffodil flower from my garden with white petals and an orange center. Water droplets cling to the flower. Macro photo against a black background.
Bar graph showing the number of psychology jobs posted each year from 2010 to 2023, broken down by subject area.
Fig. 1. Experiment Paradigms of Study 1 and Study 2.
Schematics illustrating the structure of artificial neural networks
Roseate Spoonbill
Schematic illustration of the organization of social knowledge, featuring representational spaces for actions, mental states, personality traits, and situations, with predictive links within and between these layers of knowledge.