CNS 2025 Q&A with Emily Finn
In today’s highly polarized society, most people can at least agree to the idea that any two individuals can view an event in vastly different ways. And those perceptions become our reality. But how can scientists study those perceptions in a robust way that speaks not only to the differences in their views but also to why they form different views?
Cognitive neuroscientists are leading the way in answering that question through behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational tools — developing new experimental methods that capture these differing perspectives and that perhaps offer a way to change those subjective experiences.
“A lot of our work has been aimed at convincing both ourselves and others that these complex phenomena are actually amenable to study with the tools of cognitive neuroscience,” says Emily Finn, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth College and co-recipient of the CNS 2025 Young Investigator Award. “To this end, we’ve been doing a lot of methods development, including refitting tried-and-true experimental designs and analysis techniques for use in more naturalistic settings, as well as developing and validating largely novel approaches.”
At the upcoming CNS 2025 meeting in Boston, Finn will describe her team’s innovative work to understand subjective experiences, including examples from studies that use a variety of stimuli, like films and audio tracks. She spoke with me about her early interests in this area, how they work with these stimuli, and what’s next for this line of work.
CNS: What got you started in cognitive neuroscience?
Finn: I got into cognitive neuroscience through the “backdoor” in the sense that when I started college, I very much did not consider myself a science person; I was really into languages and my intended major was linguistics. But after taking an introduction to neuroscience class largely to fulfill a distributional requirement, I found myself captivated by the idea that this three-pound lump of tissue in our skulls supports all of our thoughts, abilities, emotions and memories. The rest is history — kind of. I did take a three-year detour between college and grad school, during part of which I worked for a coffee company in Peru; ask me about it sometime.
CNS: Why did you decide to research subjective experiences, specifically?
Finn: As for how I got into subjective experience: in grad school, my collaborators and I were doing a lot of work to characterize individual differences in how brains are functionally organized. Ultimately, I realized that this variability in brain activity was interesting to me not necessarily for its own sake, but because of what it means for how different people view the world. Since then, I’ve been focusing on how idiosyncratic neural activity supports, reflects, and predicts people’s unique experiences.
CNS: In one of your preprints, which you will discuss in Boston, you create “social tuning curves” to understand differing perceptions of social interactions. What are “social tuning curves”?
Finn: If you’ll forgive the slightly coarse analogy, I would liken the “social tuning curves” in that study to different levels of sensitivity to a substance like alcohol. With alcohol, for many people, the first few sips don’t do much, but after enough sips — or whole drinks — the effects start to kick in quickly. The key idea is that that turning point is different for different people. Beyond a certain point, though, drinking more won’t have much more of an effect on behavior (though it may make you sick).
In that paper, we had people watch simple animations of two circles moving around the screen and asked them whether they thought the circles were interacting or moving independently. We were manipulating how closely the movement of one circle was tied to the other, which we considered the level of evidence for a social interaction. We found that some people didn’t need much evidence to say that a social interaction was happening, while others needed more evidence. At high enough levels of evidence, most everyone becomes quite sure that the circles are interacting. But it’s what’s going on at those middle “doses” — where the same scene might look social to one person but non-social to someone else — that is the most interesting to us. These tuning curves are how we characterize an individual person’s sensitivity to the level of evidence for “socialness”.
CNS: Your work experiments with naturalistic stimuli like films and audio clips. Is there an advantage you are finding to one medium v. the other?
Finn: Our lab enjoys experimenting with different types of visual, audio, and audiovisual stimuli, including existing media as well as stimuli we create ourselves. Many films are really good at capturing people’s attention and powerfully driving activity across the whole brain, which can be advantageous for functional imaging studies. But sometimes, a purely audio (i.e., spoken language) stimulus leaves more open to the imagination, as people may be picturing the events differently in their mind’s eye. For us, that’s a feature, not a bug, since we explicitly want to understand how a single stimulus can lead people to different interpretations. Overall, we like to use a healthy mix of stimulus types, since we find that they often provide complementary information.
CNS: As a storyteller, I am continually fascinated by how differently two people can interpret the same story that is, to me, grounded in empirical facts. What insights is your work uncovering on the neuroscience of this phenomena, and can the work inform how we present information in society?
Finn: It’s been fairly straightforward to establish that people can have different interpretations of the same information — and that these differences are reflected in, and in some cases predictable from, differences in brain activity as people are experiencing the information. What has been harder is to establish why these different interpretations arise. There are complex interactions between trait-level factors (likely including genetics), state-level factors, life experiences, prior knowledge, and context, among others, that make it extremely difficult to pinpoint specific causes. That being said, I think, and hope, that there will be eventual applications of our work in terms of understanding how to present information in a way that will minimize unintended divergences in interpretation across people — or even to highlight constructive differences that might help us appreciate the richness that comes from these varied perspectives.
CNS: What’s next for this work?
Finn: In my mind, the biggest question on the horizon is causality: where, when, and how can we intervene on brain activity to actually change someone’s subjective experience of a complex social stimulus? This will not only strengthen our basic scientific understanding of the mechanistic links between brain and behavior, but will also open the door to real-world applications, for example in helping to correct biased, maladaptive thinking patterns that arise in mental illness.
CNS: What’s your driving motivation in your research?
Finn: At this point, a big part of what motivates me is still just genuine curiosity about the questions that drive work in my lab, a major one of which is: how can the same sensory information evoke such wildly different interpretations across people, or even within the same person across time?
The other part is my trainees. I love helping them discover and articulate the research questions that are at the heart of their scientific curiosity, and develop and execute empirical studies that help them inch closer to an answer.
CNS: What are you most looking forward to at the CNS annual meeting in Boston this March?
Finn: I’m of course looking forward to all the incredible talks and scientific content, but I’m probably most excited for the spontaneous interactions with old and new friends that only really happen at an in-person meeting like this. I have two young kids, meaning I can’t travel as much for work as I otherwise might like to, so I need to make every trip count!
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
