Sebastian Speer

The Coupled Minds Lab is recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027. Our lab studies how conversations shape the way people connect, change their minds, and learn, using fMRI hyperscanning, NLP, and computational modeling. The deadline is December 1, 2026. More info here: coupled-minds.github.io

**Recruiting PhD students to join the Coupled Minds Lab!** Prospective students will have opportunities to explore questions such as: How do people develop new ideas and learn together? How do conversations build consensus? How do we interact with AI? [lab website](coupled-minds.github.io)

Many of you asked how we create those pretty whole-brain plots with the cortical outline. We just made it available as a Python package: pni-lab.github.io/quickbrain/

Recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027! This fall, I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M, where I will launch the Coupled Minds Lab. We will study how conversation shapes the way people connect, coordinate, and change their minds. Learn more: coupled-minds.github.io

Why do people devalue empathic responses believed to be edited by AI? Because empathy is a predictive social signal: genuine human empathy updates expectations about closeness and social trust. The signaling function of empathy collapses when it is cheaply outsourced. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Real-world data reveal that cooperation continually falls and rebounds. Motivation to cooperate must therefore be actively renewed rather than assumed to sustain itself go.nature.com/4tvFx7I

Excited to share our new Nature Methods paper on DeepCor, a contrastive autoencoder for denoising fMRI. DeepCor separates neural signal from noise at the voxel level, works for single participants, and outperforms CompCor by up to 215% on real data. 1/7 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Looking forward to reading this - I became a massive fan of @judithholler.bsky.social after her TiCS paper last year If you missed that one, here's the link Facial clues to conversational intentions: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

Had a great time chatting with Ava about our latest conversation research. If you're interested in what makes for a good conversation, check it out! www.mindsmatterpodcast.com/s5-ep-01-you...

New 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.

Today is Publication Day! 🎉 The Psychological Quest for Meaning is out! Aimed at researchers, but we hope it is readable for anyone interested in how humans make sense of their lives. Guilford Press is offering 15% off with code AU2E: www.guilford.com/books/The-Ps...

Our latest hyperscanning study tracks how neural coupling unfolds during genuine conversation and how it differs from simply reading scripted dialogue: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excellent new video on our recent work on the neural dynamics supporting good conversations. Check it out - if you speak German. youtube.com/watch?si=XpW6ioXhz0E7z44w&v=zFMwFdTq-YI&feature=youtu.be

Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 - our latest, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social

Pleased to share new work with @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social & undergrad interns at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA. Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models www.arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15987 🧵1/n

CogNeuroLanguage: new by @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @jeanremiking.bsky.social (w Alec Marantz & me) shows how the brain maintains-updates continuously unfolding lang hierarchy during comprehension, anchoring ling theories to biological implementation www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #neuroskyence

Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

just finished steve levinson's new book! it's a beautifully articulated argument for social interaction as the evolutionary niche which made language possible, rather than the other way around. progress in linguistics depends on a stronger science of interaction. www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

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.

Paper and R package for (more flexible) power analysis in multilevel: psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets! We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it! 1/

@falklab.bsky.social wrote a nice summary of our hyperscanning work on how people form social connection and find agreement through conversation: www.scientificamerican.com/article/good...

Finally published: “Toward a unified taxonomy of information dynamics via Integrated Information Decomposition” www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... An information-theoretic framework to analyse complex multivariate dynamical processes ✨

“As AI tools become more capable, funding agencies and institutions may question why labs need dedicated computational staff. But these examples suggest the roles will become more important, not less”

📢Out now! @jixingli.bsky.social, @lamb-cityuhk.bsky.social and colleagues assess whether instruction tuning can enhance LLM's ability to capture linguistic information in the human brain. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #compneuro #ArtificialIntelligence

New Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below

How to compute surprisal (Shannon Information) for every word in your language sample. Then --- correlate surprisal with other major lexical-semantic variables (concreteness, semantic neighborhoods, freq). reilly-lab.github.io/Surprisal.html

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers. My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers. We found 437 of them. Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

My brilliant labmate, Keith Dodd, created this non-aggressive denoising pipeline for fMRI data for his dissertation! It has been super useful on some of our high-motion datasets, and I highly suggest folks check it out for their own studies 🧠📈🪲: direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning. Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

If you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of our reward learning account of social learning—the Social Feature Learning (SFL) model—check out our recent @nathumbehav.nature.com paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our conversation analysis software is now on CRAN! Reach out with any questions. We hope it’s useful for all you language and social interaction folks out there.

"We propose a unified quantitative model that integrates decision-making and communication, revealing how verbal framing of probabilistic expression both reflects and shapes beliefs in speakers and listeners." Read more here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"! Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Optimistic people have functional MRI commonality of neural processing for imagining the future (whereas pessimists have a diverse pattern) www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory." arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063

Been really enjoying the Complexity Science Discussion Group hosted by Paul Middlebrooks, where we're working our way through the Santa Fe Institute's "Classic Papers in Complexity Science". The group is open for anyone interested: braininspired.co/complexity-g...

Major updates to our ConversationAlign R package - submitted to CRAN and JOSS today. If you're interested in computing alignment and main effects for >40 psycholinguistic dimensions in naturalistic conversation, this is the package for you reilly-conceptscognitionlab.github.io/Conversation...

Seamless Interaction dataset with 4000+ hrs of face-to-face dyadic interactions! 🤯 Seems like it could be a game changer for studying embodied turn-taking & mutual adaptation complementary with CANDOR, etc... arxiv.org/abs/2506.22554

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Check out our new TICS paper on disagreement and metacognition! We argue that disagreement drives metacognitive development by expanding children's consideration sets. With Antonia Langenhoff, Bill Thompson @wdt.bsky.social and Mahesh Srinivasan www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What a fantastic resource! Super valuable for those of us teaching experimental methods for undergrads (not to mention staying crystal clear on our own procedures) 👇

🧠 Paper out! We investigated how hippocampal and cortical ripples support memory during movie watching. We found that: 🎬 Hippocampal ripples mark event boundaries 🧩 Cortical ripples predict later recall Ripples may help transform real-life experiences into lasting memories! rdcu.be/eui9l

Does linguistic diversity when talking about emotions track wellbeing? In a new pre-print with @eriknook.bsky.social, we link emotion vocabularies to mental health in a large real-world psychotherapy dataset. Highlight: therapist emo vocab may help clients get better over time! shorturl.at/TKPN1