Publications

Electronic versions are provided as a professional courtesy to ensure timely dissemination of academic work for individual, noncommercial purposes. Copyright and all rights therein resides with the respective copyright holders, as stated within each paper. These files may not be reposted without permission. Open access papers and preprints are provided where available.

• * equal contributions.



• Preprints

• Thornton, M.A. (Invited submission, Cognition and Emotion). Deep learning models of emotion understanding. PsyArXiv.
  [Preprint]
• Lin, C., & Thornton, M.A. (2024). Bottom-up and top-down information determinants of naturalistic trait impression updating. PsyArXiv.
  [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Cheng, X. *, Popal, H. *, Wang, H. *, Hu, R., Zang, Y., Zhang, M., Thornton, M. A., Cai, H., Bi, Y. Reilly, J., Olson, I. R., Wang, Y. (2023). The Conceptual Structure of Human Relationships Across Modern and Historical Cultures. PsyArXiv.
  [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Sened, H., Phan, T., Thornton, M. A., Verosky, S., & Tamir, D. (2023). Modulation of information-source recruitment by perceived interpersonal similarity, familiarity, and liking during social inferences. PsyArXiv.
  [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Nencheva, M. L., Nook, E. C., Thornton, M. A., Lew-Williams, C., & Tamir, D.I. (2023). The co-emergence of emotion vocabulary and organized emotion dynamics in childhood. PsyArXiv.
  [Preprint] [Data & code] [Blog]
• Lin, C., Keles, U., Thornton, M. A., & Adolphs, R. (accepted in principle, registered report). Trait impressions from faces shape mental state inferences. Nature Human Behaviour.
  [Stage 1 protocol] [Data & code]
• Lin, C., Thornton, M. A. (2021). Fooled by beautiful data: Visualization aesthetics bias trust in science, news, and social media. PsyArXiv.
  [Preprint] [Data & code]



• In Press

• Barrick, E., Thornton, M. A., Zhao, Z., & Tamir, D. I. (Accepted). Individual differences in emotion prediction and implications for social success. Emotion.
  [Preprint] [Data & code] [Blog]



• 2024

• Sievers, B. * & Thornton, M.A. * (2024). Deep social neuroscience: The promise and peril of using artificial neural networks to study the social brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 19(1).
  [Paper] [Preprint]
• Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2024). Neural representations of situations and mental states are composed of sums of representations of the actions they afford. Nature Communications, 15(1).
  [Paper - open access] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Tamir, D. I., & Thornton, M. A. (2024). Predicting other people shapes the social mind. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 69, 263-315.
  [Paper] [PDF]
• Wheatley, T. *, Thornton, M. A. *, Stolk, A. *, & Chang, L.J. * (2024). The emerging science of interacting minds. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(2), 355-373.
  [Paper] [PDF]



• 2023

• Lin, C., Bulls, L. S. *, Tepfer, L. J. *, Vyas, A. D. *, Thornton, M. A., (2023). Advancing naturalistic affective science with deep learning. Affective Science, 4, 550-562.
  [Paper] [Preprint]
• Lin, C., & Thornton, M. A. (2023). Evidence for bidirectional causation between trait and mental state inferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 108, 104495.
  [PDF] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Thornton, M. A., Rmus, M., Vyas, A. D., & Tamir, D. I. (2023). Transition dynamics shape mental state concepts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
  [PDF] [Preprint] [Data & code]



• 2022

• Thornton, M. A., Wolf, S., Reilly, B. J., Slingerland, T. G. & Tamir, D. I. (2022). The 3d Mind Model characterizes how people understand mental states across modern and historical cultures. Affective Science, 3(1), 93-104.
  [Paper] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2022). Six dimensions describe action understanding: the ACT-FASTaxonomy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(4), 577-605.
  [Paper] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Zhao, Z., Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2022). Accurate emotion prediction in dyads and groups and its potential social benefits. Emotion, 22(5), 1030-1043.
  [Paper] [Preprint] [Data & code]



• 2021

• Barrick, E. M., Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2021). Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing. PLoS ONE 16(10): e0258470.
  [Paper - open access] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Weaverdyck, M. E., Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2021). Stable neural representations of mental states across target people and stimulus modalities. NeuroImage, 238, 118258.
  [Paper] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2021). People accurately predict the transition probabilities between actions. Science Advances, 7(9), eabd4995.
  [Paper - open access] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2021). The organization of social knowledge is tuned for prediction. In M. Gilead & K. Ochsner (Ed.) The Neural Basis of Mentalizing. Springer Nature.
  [Chapter] [Book]



• 2020

• Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2020). Perceiving actions before they happen: Psychological dimensions scaffold neural action prediction. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 16(8), 807-815.
  [Paper - open access] [Preprint] [Data & code]
• Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2020). People represent mental states in terms of rationality, social impact, and valence: Validating the 3d Mind Model. Cortex, 125, 44-59.
  [Paper] [Preprint] [Data & code] [Blog]



• 2019

• Thornton, M. A., Weaverdyck, M. E., & Tamir, D. I. (2019). The brain represents people as the mental states they habitually experience. Nature Communications, 10, 2291.
  [Paper - open access] [Preprint] [Data & code] [Blog]
• Thornton, M. A., Weaverdyck, M. E., Mildner, J. N., & Tamir, D. I. (2019). People represent their own mental states more distinctly than those of others. Nature Communications, 10 , 2117.
  [Paper - open access] [Preprint] [Data & code] [Blog]
• Thornton, M. A., Weaverdyck, M. E., & Tamir, D. I. (2019). The social brain automatically predicts others’ future mental states. The Journal of Neuroscience, 39(1), 140-148.
  [Preprint] [Data & code] [Blog]



• 2018

• Tamir, D.I. *, Thornton, M.A. * (2018). Modeling the predictive social mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(3) 201-212.
  [PDF] [Commentary by Rebecca Saxe]
• Thornton, M. A., & Mitchell, J. P. (2018). Theories of person perception predict patterns of neural activity during mentalizing. Cerebral Cortex, 28(10), 3505-3520.
  [PDF] [Data & code] [Blog]



• 2017

• Thornton, M. A., & Mitchell, J. P. (2017). Consistent neural activity patterns represent personally familiar people. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 29(9), 1583-1594.
  [PDF] [Data & code] [Blog]
• Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2017). Mental models accurately predict emotion transitions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(23), 5982-5987.
  [PDF] [Data & code] [Blog]
• Rodriguez, S. B. *, Thornton, M. A. *, & Thornton, R. J. (2017). Discrimination of Wine Lactic Acid Bacteria by Raman Spectroscopy. Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, 44(8), 1167-1175.
  [PDF] [Data & code] [Blog]



• 2016

• Tamir, D. I. *, Thornton, M. A. *, Contreras, J. M., & Mitchell, J. P. (2016). Neural evidence that three dimensions organize mental state representation: Rationality, social impact, and valence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(1), 194-199.
  [PDF] [Data & code] [Blog] [Commentary by Dubois & Adolphs]



• 2013

• Rodriguez, S. B., Thornton, M. A., & Thornton, R. J. (2013). Raman spectroscopy and chemometrics for identification and strain discrimination of the wine spoilage yeasts Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Zygosaccharomyces bailii, and Brettanomyces bruxellensis. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 79(20), 6264-6270.
  [PDF] [Blog]
• Thornton, M. A., & Conway, A. R. (2013). Working memory for social information: Chunking or domain-specific buffer? NeuroImage, 70, 233-239.
  [PDF]