Yaara Yeshurun

Tel Aviv University | TAU · School of Psychological Sciences

One of the richest and most powerful tools in social communication is the face. Facial expressions are a prominent way to convey high-dimensional, dynamic information, such as emotion, motivation, and intentions. Previous research has linked mimicry of facial expressions to positive human interaction (e.g., mutual agreement). In this study, we inve...

Infant stimuli elicit widespread neural and behavioral response in human adults and such massive allocation of resources attests to the evolutionary significance of the primary attachment. Here, we examined whether attachment reminders also trigger cross-brain concordance and generate greater neural uniformity, as indicated by inter-subject correla...

We can all agree that a good story engages us, however, agreeing which story is good is far more debatable. In this study, we explored whether engagement with a narrative synchronizes listeners' brain responses, by examining individual differences in engagement to the same story. To do so, we pre-registered and re-analyzed a previously collected da...

Word embedding representations have been shown to be effective in predicting human neural responses to lingual stimuli. While these representations are sensitive to the textual context, they lack the extratextual sources of context such as prior knowledge, thoughts, and beliefs, all of which constitute the listener's perspective. In this study, we...

Infant stimuli elicit widespread neural and behavioral response in human adults and such massive allocation of resources attests to the evolutionary significance of the primary attachment. Here, we examined whether attachment-related cues also trigger cross-brain concordance, generating greater neural uniformity among individuals. Post-partum mothe...

Recent political polarization has illustrated how individuals with opposing political views often experience ongoing events in markedly different ways. In this study, we explored the neural mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. We conducted functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) scanning of thirty-four right- and left-wing participants (45%...

We can all agree that a good story engages us, however, agreeing which story is good is far more debatable. In this study, we explored whether engagement with a narrative synchronizes listeners' brain responses, by examining individual differences in engagement to the same story. To do so, we pre-registered and re-analyzed a previously collected da...

We explored the potential of using real-time fMRI (rt-fMRI) neurofeedback training to bias interpretations of naturalistic narrative stimuli. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two possible conditions, each corresponding to a different interpretation of an ambiguous spoken story. While participants listened to the story in the scanner, n...

Synchronization has been identified as a key aspect in social bonding. While synchronization could be maximized by increasing the predictability of an interaction, such predictability is in tension with individuals’ level of interest, which is tied to the interaction’s complexity and novelty. In this study, we tested the interplay between synchroni...

We explored the potential of using real-time fMRI (rt-fMRI) neurofeedback training to bias interpretations of naturalis-tic narrative stimuli. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two possible conditions, each corresponding to a different interpretation of an ambiguous spoken story. While participants listened to the story in the scanner,...

Recent political polarization has highlighted the extent to which individuals with opposing views experience ongoing events in markedly different ways. In this study, we explored the neural mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. We conducted functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) scanning right- and left-wing participants watching political v...

Computational Deep Language Models (DLMs) have been shown to be effective in predicting neural responses during natural language processing. This study introduces a novel computational framework, based on the concept of fine-tuning (Hinton, 2007), for modeling differences in interpretation of narratives based on the listeners' perspective (i.e. the...

Much of our time is spent communicating with other people, including family, friends, and teachers. When we talk with others, we are interested in understanding one another, and we can often sense when the communication is good. Scientists suggest that synchronization—a state in which things happen simultaneously—contributes to good communication....

In the COVID-19 era, physical interactions ubiquitously pose a disease threat. Using a novel online paradigm, this study tested whether under such unique circumstances, the fundamental motivation to avoid disease-related threats interacts with individual differences in sociability, such that: (i) responses to others are slowed down, particularly am...

Publication: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06610-z Synchronization has been identified as a key aspect of achieving mutual goals and enhancing social bonding. While synchronization could be maximized by increasing the predictability of an interaction, such predictability is in tension with individuals’ level of interest, which is tied to the...

The "Narratives" collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for...

Synchronization is a critical aspect of social bonding. We use our body to share information and get into sync with others. Predictability facilitates synchronization, which has been suggested as a mechanism for social bonding. This stands in contrast to our striving for interesting, novel, and challenging interactions. In this study we asked 100 d...

Reorganization of the maternal brain upon childbirth triggers species-typical maternal social behavior. These brief social moments carry profound effects on the infant's brain and likely have distinct signature in the maternal brain. Utilizing a double-blind, within-subject oxytocin/placebo administration crossover design, mothers' brain was imaged...

This study examined how the brain dynamically updates event representations by integrating new information over multiple minutes while segregating irrelevant input. A professional writer custom-designed a narrative with two independent storylines, interleaving across minute-long segments (ABAB). In the last (C) part, characters from the two storyli...

The default mode network (DMN) is classically considered an ‘intrinsic’ system, specializing in internally oriented cognitive processes such as daydreaming, reminiscing and future planning. In this Perspective, we suggest that the DMN is an active and dynamic ‘sense-making’ network that integrates incoming extrinsic information with prior intrinsic...

Significance We propose a robust video-based method for estimating the positions of fNIRS optodes on the scalp. Aim Calibrating the location of optodes relative to a subject’s scalp is an important step in acquisition of reliable neuroimaging data, and is a relatively open problem when dealing with developmental populations. Existing methods pose...

The "Narratives" collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for...

This study examined how the brain dynamically updates event representations by integrating new information over multiple minutes while segregating irrelevant input. A professional writer custom-designed a narrative with two independent storylines, interleaving across minute-long segments (ABAB). In the last (C) part, characters from the two storyli...

Reorganization of the maternal brain, primed by oxytocin surge during childbirth, triggers the species-typical maternal social behavior. These brief social moments carry profound effects on the infant's social brain and likely have a distinct signature in the maternal brain. Utilizing a double-blind, oxytocin/placebo administration crossover design...

Equally contributed, listed in alphabetical order Social chemistry is a critical aspect of our life as human beings. We use our body to share information with others and to understand them. Recently, studies suggest that movement synchronization during social interaction might be important for social bonding. The current study aimed to understand h...

Real-life events unfold continuously over multiple minutes. In this study, in order to examine how the brain continuously integrates information while segregating the accumulated information from irrelevant inputs, a professional writer actively designed a narrative. Two unrelated storylines were interleaved across 30 one-minute segments (ABAB) and...

Significance Changing a few words in a story can drastically alter the interpretation of the narrative. How does the brain amplify sparse changes in word selection to create a unique neural representation for each narrative? In our study, participants listened to one of two stories while being scanned using fMRI. The stories had an identical gramma...

Changing just a few words in a story can induce a substantial change in the overall narrative. How does the brain accumulate and process local and sparse changes, creating a unique situation model of the story, over the course of a real-life narrative? Recently, we mapped a hierarchy of processing timescales in the brain: from early sensory areas t...

Differences in people's beliefs can substantially impact their interpretation of a series of events. In this functional MRI study, we manipulated subjects' beliefs, leading two groups of subjects to interpret the same narrative in different ways. We found that responses in higher-order brain areas-including the default-mode network, language areas,...

Does the default mode network (DMN) reconfigure to encode information about the changing environment? This question has proven difficult, because patterns of functional connectivity reflect a mixture of stimulus-induced neural processes, intrinsic neural processes and non-neuronal noise. Here we introduce inter-subject functional correlation (ISFC)...

Supplementary Figures 1-11, Supplementary Tables 1-2, Supplementary Notes 1-2, Supplementary References.

Multi-subject fMRI data is critical for evaluating the generality and validity of findings across subjects, and its effective utilization helps improve analysis sensitivity. We develop a shared response model for aggregating multi-subject fMRI data that accounts for different functional topographies among anatomically aligned datasets. Our model de...

Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function. We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion-related odorless tears obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal att...

Paradoxically, improvements in emergency medicine have increased survival albeit with severe disability ranging from quadriplegia to "locked-in syndrome." Locked-in syndrome is characterized by intact cognition yet complete paralysis, and hence these individuals are "locked-in" their own body, at best able to communicate using eye blinks alone. Sni...

By demonstrating that inactivation of gustatory cortex influences olfactory recognition, a new study finds that the interaction between taste and smell is bidirectional.

Olfaction is often referred to as a multidimensional sense. It is multidimensional in that approximately 1000 different receptor types, each tuned to particular odor aspects, together contribute to the olfactory percept. In humans, however, this percept is nearly unidimensional. Humans can detect and discriminate countless odorants, but can identif...

Authors, poets, and scientists have been fascinated by the strength of childhood olfactory memories. Indeed, in long-term memory, the first odor-to-object association was stronger than subsequent associations of the same odor with other objects. Here we tested the hypothesis that first odor associations enjoy a privileged brain representation. Beca...

The fourth edition of the work that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience, offering completely new material. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The fourth edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions in the study of the biologic und...

Olfactory information reaches olfactory cortex without a thalamic relay. This neuroanatomical substrate has combined with functional findings to suggest that, in olfaction, the typical thalamic role in sensory processing has shifted to the olfactory bulb or olfactory cortex. With this in mind, we set out to ask whether the thalamus at all plays a s...

Whether olfactory working memory involves verbal representations or neural images of odor per se remains unclear. This study investigated whether verbal representation influences performance in an olfactory delayed-match-to-sample task and used monorhinal presentation to generate hypotheses as to the underlying anatomy of this mechanism. The main f...

Overnight sleep contributes to memory consolidation; even a short nap improves memory performance. Such improvement has been linked to hippocampal activity during sleep. Melatonin has been shown to affect the human hippocampus and to induce 'sleep like' changes in brain activation. We therefore conducted and compared two functional magnetic resonan...

Melatonin, the hormone produced nocturnally by the pineal gland, is an endogenous regulator of the sleep-wake cycle. The effects of melatonin on brain activities and their relation to induction of sleepiness were studied in a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Melatonin, but not placebo,...

To what extent does emotional traumatic context affect sensory processing in the brain? A striking example of emotional impact on sensation is manifested in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which a severe emotional trauma produces recurrent and vivid unpleasant sensory recollections. Here we report on an fMRI study exploring the sensory pro...

To what extent does emotional traumatic context affect sensory processing in the brain? A striking example of emotional impact on sensation is manifested in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which a severe emotional trauma produces recurrent and vivid unpleasant sensory recollections. Here we report on an fMRI study exploring the sensory pro...