The monster in the room University of California Press, 2025. 336 pp.

A historian interrogates the mythical creatures we create to dehumanize and devalue others.

Narrative 'twist' shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features.

Given the same external input, one's understanding of that input can differ based on internal contextual knowledge. Where and how does the brain represent latent belief frameworks that interact with incoming sensory information to shape subjective interpretations? In this study, participants listened to the same auditory narrative twice, with a plot twist in the middle that dramatically shifted their interpretations of the story. Using a robust within-subject whole-brain approach, we leveraged shifts in neural activity between the two listens to identify where latent interpretations are represented in the brain.

Shared and individual tuning curves for social vision.

A stimulus with light is clearly visual; a stimulus with sound is clearly auditory. But what makes a stimulus "social", and how do judgments of socialness differ across people? Here, we characterize both group-level and individual thresholds for perceiving the presence and nature of a social interaction. We take advantage of the fact that humans are primed to see social interactions-e.

What is the best brain state to predict autistic traits?

Autism is a heterogeneous condition, and functional magnetic resonance imaging-based studies have advanced understanding of neurobiological correlates of autistic features. Nevertheless, little work has focused on the optimal brain states to reveal brain-phenotype relationships. In addition, there is a need to better understand the relevance of attentional abilities in mediating autistic features.