Rebecca Saxe

Tonight at 7pm: Nancy Kanwisher will be on On Point!! Talking about the brain. @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @npr.org

And @preprint.bsky.social and Camille Osumah!

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi....

Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!

Lots of other neat insights, pretty figures, and amazing data wrangling in the paper by @lillianbehm.bsky.social ‬!

& thanks to Saxelab contributors @hilaryrichardson.bsky.social @kosakowski.bsky.social @fkamps.bsky.social @halieolson.bsky.social @emilychen.bsky.social @bmhdeen.bsky.social

We get on average 10 min of usable data per infant. 😂

Today's paper: After more than a decade of efforts, with two independent labs taking complementary approaches, trying multiple experiments, teams of dozens of trainees, and hundreds of infant volunteers ...

Organization of high-level visual cortex in human infants - Nature Communications Adult visual cortex is organized into regions that respond to categories such as faces and scenes, but it is unclear if this depends on experience. Here, authors measured brain activity in 4–6 month o...

In 2013, the heroic team led by @bmhdeen.bsky.social started trying to scan awake infants watching movies.
At first we only managed to get on average ~10 min of usable data per infant.
www.nature.com/articles/nco...

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi...

Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

MIT Prize for Open Data | Open Data @ MIT To highlight the value of open data at MIT, and to encourage the next generation of researchers, the MIT School of Science and the MIT Libraries present the MIT Prize for Open Data. Congratulations to...

If you are at MIT today come to the Open Data prize celebration at 3pm in the Nexus!

libraries.mit.edu/opendata/ope...

My sister @shoshannasaxe.bsky.social
In this podcast, just rocks. So proud.
www.podbean.com/ep/pb-bqngw-...

Totally agree with Mikes description of this project as a wild journey, utterly joyous true collaboration, and satisfying first step for quantitative predictive rational model of habituation.

Not the first time I’ve suggested a “first step” in research that required a whole PhD to complete. 😉

infant data from experiment 1

conceptual schema for different habituation models

title page

results from experiment 2 with adults

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:

A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

Total disaster for the #drosophila community if flybase disappears

Thanks so much to everyone was patient and supportive of my de-tangling efforts over the last 7 years.

‪@guggfellows.bsky.social‬
Patrick J McGovern Foundation
McGovern Institute at MIT
and so many friends and colleagues.

Fin.

I have found this insights are ... disconcertingly ... relevant to current events over the past year. Maybe a topic for another thread sometime.

16/17

My other favourite part is that we fit this complex model to the data from Study 1 and used it, with no free parameters, to predict the results in Study 2 & 3, for situations the model had never seen (e.g. punishment of allies or competitors, or that was personally costly or beneficial).

15/17

Having a single model that synthesizes these different results is enormously satisfying to me.

The synthesis, per se.

Putting the pieces together.

14/17

Because Bayesian inference is continuous and quantitative, there are many intermediate cases in which people update all of their beliefs to some degree. People - human minds - do joint inference.

13/17

When observers believe that the target act was not wrong, the punisher gained directly from punishing, or punished a competitor or enemy, then punishment neither teaches norms nor improves reputation.

e.g. the controversy about when people punish out-groups more severely than in-groups.

12/17

When observers believe that the target act violated norms, punishers look justice-motivated. Costly punishment enhances their reputation for unselfishness. Punishment of an ally increases their reputation for impartiality.

e.g. third party punishment in common goods games.

11/17

When observers believe that the punishing authority is motivating by justice and is impartial, then punishment communicates social norms, and the severity of norm violations.

E.g. vignettes about parents, institutions, or justice systems in the role of punisher.

10/17

Essentially, the prior literatures on punishment are each studying a special case, when observers have strong prior beliefs about one dimension of the situation.

People learn from punishment, whichever feature of the situation they don’t already know.

9/17

And the model derives from a familiar one: the Bayesian Theory of Mind model that Josh, Chris Baker and I worked on nearly twenty years ago (yikes).

saxelab.mit.edu/wp-content/u...

8/17

Working with @setayeshradkani.bsky.social and @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social: these three patterns are consequences of a single underlying cognitive model.

7/17

What is going on?

For years, I found reading about punishment soooo confusing.

6/17

And yet, third, punishment often fails in both regards. Very often, after punishment, the target does not learn the intended norm *and* does not trust the punisher. To the contrary, the target may reject the lesson and the punisher as a bully.

This happens to parents (ugh) and governments.

5/17

Second, punishment can be altruism, paying a personal cost to benefit society. So, punishment must benefit reputation: Punishers are trusted, seen as unselfish and committed to norms.

Great e.g. is Lily Tsai’s work: how single-party governments punish officials for alleged corruption.

4/17

First, punishment is one way people teach and communicate norms. More severe punishments are chosen for more severe violations, so that both the targets of punishment and other observers learn and internalize the norms.



For example, think of how parents punish their children.

3/17

Punishment is VERY puzzling.

This work entangles one piece of the puzzle.

2/17

So pleased and proud to share this work.

I started trying to think clearly about authority punishment in 2018. This new paper with Setayesh Radkani is the first fruit of that labour.

Why so much struggle? See thread.

1/17