Beau Sievers

Cognitive and social neuroscience research

I am a Computational Social Neuroscientist at Apple. Previously, I worked with Jamil Zaki at the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, Joshua Greene at Harvard, and Thalia Wheatley at the Dartmouth Social Systems Lab, where I completed my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience.

I am also a composer and performer on percussion and electronics, and was a founding organizer of Indexical.

Contact

Please feel free to email me.

Publications

• Sievers, B., Welker, C. Hasson, U., Kleinbaum, A, M. & Wheatley, T. (In press). Consensus-building conversation leads to neural alignment. Nature Communications. Open access preprint.
• Sievers, B.*, Thornton, M. A.* (In press). Deep social neuroscience: The promise and peril of using artificial neural networks to study the social brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience nsae014. *Equal contribution. Open access preprint.
• Berhard, R. M., Frankland, S. M., Plunkett, D., Sievers, B., Greene, J. D. (2023). Evidence for Spinozan “Unbelieving” in the Right Inferior Prefrontal Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 35, 4. Open access preprint.
• Sievers, B., DiFilippis, E. (2022). Causal complexity demands community coordination. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45, E31. This paper is a comment on Yarkoni (2022), The Generalizability Crisis. Open access preprint.
• Sievers, B., Parkinson, C., Kohler, P.J., Hughes, J., Fogelson, S.V., & Wheatley, T. (2021). Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception. Current Biology, 31. Open data. Stimuli. Software. Open access preprint.
• Sievers, B., Wheatley, T. (2021). Rapid dissonant grunting, or, But why does music sound the way it does? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44 E111. This paper is a comment on Mehr et al. (2021), Origins of music in credible signaling, and Savage et al. (2021), Music as a coevolved system for social bonding. Open access preprint.
• Sievers, B., Momennejad, I. (2019). SAMPL: The Spreading Activation and Memory PLasticity Model. Open source implementation of SAMPL. Open access preprint.
• Sievers, B., Lee, C., Haslett, W., & Wheatley, T. (2019). A multi-sensory code for emotional arousal. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286. Data, code, and materials. Open access preprint.
• Levari, D. E., Gilbert, D.T., Wilson, T.D., Sievers, B., Amodio, D.M. & Wheatley, T. (2018). Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment. Science.
• Sievers, B., Parkinson, C., Walker, T., Haslett, W., & Wheatley, T. (2017). Low-level percepts predict emotion concepts across modalities and cultures. Open access preprint.
• Wheatley, T. & Sievers, B. (2015). Toward a neuroscience of social resonance. In Greene, Morrison & Seligman (Eds.) Positive Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sievers, B., Polansky, L., Casey, M., & Wheatley, T. (2013). Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(1) 70–75. Software. Open access PDF.
• Parkinson, C., Kohler, P., Sievers, B., & Wheatley, T. (2012). Associations between auditory pitch and visual elevation do not depend on language: Evidence from a remote population. Perception, 41, 854–861. PDF.
• Sievers, B. (2006). A young person’s guide to the principles of music synthesis.

Teaching

• Irony & Utopia: History of Computer Art at Bruce High Quality Foundation University. Spring and summer sessions, 2010. This syllabus provides a half-decent history of computer art from 1965–2010. Allen Riley updated the content for his History of Computer Art course at AS220.

Software

fmri_go

fmri_go is open source software for presenting timelocked stimuli in an fMRI scanner and recording participant responses using PsychoPy. This software is in active development—use at your own risk.

Bouncing Ball

Bouncing Ball is open source software for comparing the dynamics of music and movement as described in Sievers, B., Polansky, L., Casey, M., & Wheatley, T. (2013). Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(1), 70-75.

Morphological Metrics

Morphological Metrics is a Ruby implementation of metrics described in Larry Polansky's article Morphological Metrics. Larry's work on Morphological Metrics is of interest for anybody who wants to quantitatively compare contours; I came to it as a composer and continue to return regularly as a scientist.

Ruby PCSet

Ruby PCSet is a simple Ruby library for performing musical pitch-class set theory operations. It has a few nice things which similar tools lack, including evaluation of some properties described by Balzano (coherence, uniqueness) and Huron (aggregate dyadic consonance).