From maybe the best teacher I know: Idan Blank explains transformers in a super intuitive and fun way!
Idan Blank (UCLA, psych) makes the complex intuitive
if you want to learn how LLMs work, watch👇
newly posted to YouTube (no ads)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGMn...
I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...
On Saturday, @itsneuronal.bsky.social will be kindly presenting our work on "Modulating Cross-Modal Convergence with Single-Stimulus, Intra-Modal Dispersion."
📍 Poster 3-194.
a collaboration with @thisismyhat.bsky.social and
@evfedorenko.bsky.social. Be sure to stop by their poster and say hi :)
Excited to share these two works at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social !
On Friday, Jack King presents his work on "Representational curvature shapes uncertainty in large language models."
📍 Poster 2-223
Done in collaboration with
@evfedorenko.bsky.social. 🧵👇
Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!!
cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...
I am hiring a new lab manager for the @umdleadlab.bsky.social to start this summer! Job ad and link to apply here. Please re-post and share with your seniors, and/or anyone else who would be a good fit! docs.google.com/document/d/1...
📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language
Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging
Deadline March 20
Please RT 🙏
👇
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language
Please tell friends & colleagues about our unique course “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” July 27-Aug 3 2026. Expert tutors, interactive talks, panel discussions, all in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
@cshlnews.bsky.social @cshlbanbury.bsky.social
❤️
So proud and honored to have shared the floor with amazing women scientists for a panel discussion on Women in Neuroscience at NYU Abu Dhabi. It’s appalling to see that no matter where you are, women in science face the same big challenges. But changes are happening and we now have each other 💪
Go Jingnan!!
I am thrilled to share that I’ll be joining the University of Notre Dame (@notredame.bsky.social) as an Assistant Professor of Psychology this July!☘️🧠 Please reach out if you're interested in joining my lab! More details to follow soon.
Soon hiring a lab manager! Looking for someone who is really interested in language neuroscience, who is organised, motivated, a great communicator, and who works well in a research team. Express interest by submitting this form: tinyurl.com/glysn-labman...
Reposts appreciated!
New in Neuron! A team including #KempnerInstitute’s
@coltoncasto.bsky.social & @gretatuckute.bsky.social maps the cerebellum's role beyond motor control as part of an extended language network.🧠🗣️
More here: bit.ly/4rptQ13 #neuroscience #fMRI
@gsas.harvard.edu @evfedorenko.bsky.social
The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal!
Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/6)
Could not be more excited about Colton's @coltoncasto.bsky.social work! A deep dive into the linguistic cerebellum, and a discovery of an area remarkably functionally similar to the core left-hemisphere language areas, including in its selectivity for language. Go Colton and team!
The cerebellum supports high-level language?? Now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social, we systematically examined language-responsive areas of the cerebellum using precision fMRI and identified a *cerebellar satellite* of the neocortical language network!
authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUU83BtfH...
1/n 🧵👇
I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊
Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
The must-read paper on LLMs, language, and thought that I reference here:
Dissociating language and thought in large language models
arxiv.org/abs/2301.06627
by @kmahowald.bsky.social @neuranna.bsky.social Idan Blank @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social
I may be a *little* biased but this 📘 is GREAT! If you ever found language structure interesting, but were turned off by implausible and overly complicated accounts, this book is 4U: a simple and empirically grounded account of the syntax of natural lgs. A must-read for lang researchers+aficionados!
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press.
This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website:
tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...
Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3
Go @tamaregev! Tamar systematically characterized prosody-processing🧠areas using precision fMRI.
The overlap between the prosody and language areas connects beautifully with her computational findings of high mutual information between words and prosodic features! Such a cool research program. :)
New preprint on prosody in the brain!
tinyurl.com/2ndswjwu
HeeSoKim NiharikaJhingan SaraSwords @hopekean.bsky.social @coltoncasto.bsky.social JenniferCole @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Prosody areas are distinct from pitch, speech, and multiple-demand areas, and partly overlap with lang+social areas→🧵
Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!
Yup I realized that when one of his New Yorker articles discussed his great idea that the brain might have a special region for face recognition, all presented as his idea long after this had been widely published.
Incredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
