Personal Presentation

My research combines large-scale natural language processing (NLP), political psychology, and computational social science to study democratic preferences, trust in institutions, climate activism, and long-term socio-political change. I use historical and contemporary text corpora (newspapers, fiction, media coverage, lyrics) to quantify changes in mentalities over time and test the effects of shocks and socioeconomic trends on the zeitgeist.

A complementary line of research investigates the evolution of hierarchical cognition in vision, music, language, and action, using behavioral and neuroimaging methods.

CV:
https://mauriciojdmartins.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/CV_Martins_Apr2025.pdf 

Website: 
https://mauriciojdmartins.com/

Open Science Forum: 
https://osf.io/6rbzu/ 

Selected works

NLP

1. Martins M, Baumard N (2020). The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe. PNAS 117 (46) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2009571117
2. Baumard N, Safra L, Martins M., Chevallier C (2023). Cognitive fossils: How literature, music, and the arts can be used to recover psychological changes throughout history. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.10.001
3. Forametti M, Nater U, Lamm C, Martins M (2025). Rising Stress, Negativity, and Simplicity in US Billboard Top 100 Song Lyrics (1973–2023) are Disrupted by Societal Crises. Scientific Reports https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-28327-5
4. Reiter D, Lamm C, Martins M (2026). From Singing in the Rain to Tears in the Rain: Socio-demographic Trends and Pessimism during New Hollywood. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06532-5
5. Mayrhofer, L., Foramitti, M., Fassnacht, S., Köhler, J. K., Todorova, B., Lamm, C., & Martins, M. (2026). Radical climate protests shaped portrayals of moderate activists and reader attitudes in German news media. npj Climate Activism https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-026-00361-7

1. Martins M, Krause C, Neville D, Pino D, Villringer A, Obrig H (2019). Recursive Hierarchical Embedding in vision is impaired by posterior Middle Temporal Gyrus lesions. Brain 142 (10) https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awz242
2. Fitch WT, Martins M (2014). Hierarchical Processing in Music, Language, and Action: Lashley Revisited. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1316 https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12406
3. Martins M (2012). Distinctive signatures of recursion. Phil Trans. R. Soc. B 367 https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0097
4. Fischmeister F, Martins M, Beisteiner R, Fitch WT (2016). Self-similarity and Recursion as Default Modes of Human Cognition. Cortex 97 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2016.08.016.
5. Martins M, Fishmeister F, Puig Waldmüller E, Oh J, Geissler A, Fitch WT, Beisteiner R (2014). Fractal Image Perception provides Novel Insights into Hierarchical Cognition. NeuroImage 96 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.03.064