Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Dartmouth. PI of the Functional Imaging & Naturalistic Neuroscience (FINN) Lab.
https://thefinnlab.github.io/
Emily Finn
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Fantastic work led by PhD student @csavasegal.bsky.social with a big assist from former lab postdoc Dr. Clare Grall
Emily Finn
In the first #SANS2026 session on social learning @csavasegal.bsky.social shows that self-generated interpretations anchor how we remember ambiguous social info, even when others offer a different take, and how neural shifts help us make the shift
So bummed to be missing #SANS2026, but be sure to check out the first symposium tomorrow morning (Thurs 9:30a), "New Directions in Social Learning & Memory"! @csavasegal.bsky.social will share some cool new work on how we remember our own vs another person's interpretation of ambiguous social info
There's a lot more in the paper, but to me, seeing just how much can change in the *exact same brain* processing the *exact same stimulus* is a striking demo of how our brains represent info not according to its surface (sensory) features, but the latent frameworks we bring to understanding it
Huge congrats to @monicarosenb.bsky.social, an amazing scientist and even better friend
We did follow-up analyses to identify subsets of these regions that appear to track interpretations of characters versus more punctate episodes, finding dissociable sets of regions for representing distinct narrative elements. We also did several control analyses to rule out confounding factors.
We used a unique auditory story with a twist in the middle. *Spoiler alert*: while you initially think you're hearing a dialogue between a friendly store clerk and disgruntled shopper, you later realize the clerk is a killer robot and the shopper is fighting for his life in an apocalypse.
Participants listened through the whole story twice, yielding a straightforward hypothesis: interpretations, and therefore neural representations, of *pre-twist* events will change more than those of *post-twist* events. Indeed, this was the case throughout a whole lot of the brain!
Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7
