Welcome! I am Mark Thornton, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, and the Director of the Social Computation Representation And Prediction Laboratory (SCRAP Lab). If you would like to get in touch with me, you can do so here. You can find my CV here.

My research focuses on social prediction: how people anticipate the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people. I try to understand the principles our minds and brains use to organize social knowledge, and how we are able to make useful social predictions on the basis of such understanding. To this end, I use a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), computational modelling, behavioral experiments, and innovative web techniques. You can read more about my research here. My blog also features accessible summaries of my research papers. If you're interested in participating in my research - and learning more about yourself in the process - please check out my online experiment platform: mysocialbrain.org.

Prior to my current position, I was a postdoctoral research associate working with Diana Tamir in the Princeton Social Neuroscience Laboratory at Princeton University. I received my Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University, working in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab with Jason Mitchell. As an undergraduate I attended Princeton University where I obtained my bachelor's degree in psychology working with Andrew Conway.