Will Decker

Check this out!

What does it mean to understand language? Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇

Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)

🤖📈 How do LLMs use their depth?

Akshat Gupta led a fun project to find out! We leverage TunedLens (~linear decoding of tokens) to explore how LLMs' internal representations change from layer to layer.

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2510.18871

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The new #NSF #GRFP application now excludes 1000’s of students, including those who were told they could apply this year, or who planned to apply next year.

We have a new specific petition urging #NSFGRFP undo this harmful action. If you are impacted sign here: laurenkuehne.github.io/grfpChanges/

Our young lab greatly appreciates open datasets and code provided by pioneers in the field! @alexanderhuth.bsky.social
@amandalebel.bsky.social
@rjantonello.bsky.social
@mtoneva.bsky.social
@samnastase.bsky.social
@jixingli.bsky.social
@mschrimpf.bsky.social
@evfedorenko.bsky.social
etc
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Check out @neurotaha.bsky.social new work!

The GRFP announcement from NSF cuts out an entire cohort of 2nd year students from consideration, without warning. This is so deeply unfair that it warrants a formal protest from the scientific community. If someone wants to work with me to craft an open letter and solicit signatures, LMK.

Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737

I am hiring a post doc at UAlberta, affiliated with Amii! We study language processing in the brain using LLMs and neuroimaging. Looking for someone with experience with ideally both neuroimaging and LLMs, or a willingness to learn. Email me with Qs
apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...

Image of labubu doll labeled labubu next to image of spiky labubu doll labeled lakiki

::slowly stands while clapping::

An empty booth with a sign that says “vendor removed for selling AI art #ArtBYHumans”

I love the smell of consequences in the morning. Thank you, @dragoncon.org

In our new paper, we explore how we can build encoding models that are both powerful and understandable. Our model uses an LLM to answer 35 questions about a sentence's content. The answers linearly contribute to our prediction of how the brain will respond to that sentence. 1/6

Many thanks to the volunteer organizers and the flash talk presenters for making the CCN watch party at Georgia Tech a success! And thanks all attendees for coming and engaging in discussions!

Looking forward to #CogSci2025 ! Find us throughout the conference

Atlanta community: we are organizing a CCN @cogcompneuro.bsky.social watch party!

Watch the talks, engage in structured discussions, and (optionally) present your own work.

Register:
forms.gle/AWxVPbrgxkdd...
Schedule:
tinyurl.com/ccn2025atlanta

Georgia Tech’s Neuro Next Initiative has officially evolved into the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). A new era of interdisciplinary research begins today.

🔗 neuro.gatech.edu

#Neuroscience #Neurotech #GeorgiaTech

So far we have CCN local meetups @ NYC @neurograce.bsky.social, Boston @lynnkasorensen.bsky.social, Atlanta @neuranna.bsky.social, Lyon and Bucharest!

Who will host one on even further away from Amsterdam (West Coast? East Asia? Africa?)

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing?

We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

A postdoc in my lab contacted a fellow scientist to get some advice and was told that, because he's currently working on the topic, he "can't give away all his secrets." I find this extremely lame, and yet I keep encountering it. Science is not a zero-sum game!!

New preprint ✨ w/ @olafhauk.bsky.social and Matt Lambon Ralph @mrccbu.bsky.social @cambridgeuni.bsky.social @gatescambridge.bsky.social

The anterior temporal lobe (ATL) seems crucial for both semantic memory and semantic composition. How to make sense of this neuroanatomical alignment? 🧠

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Learning about color from language - Communications Psychology Blind people show similar associations between adjectives (e.g. cold) and colours (e.g. blue) as sighted people; word embedding models trained on corpora of written and spoken language learn these ass...

Very cool work by Qiawen (Ella) Liu, Paridon, @glupyan.bsky.social: e.g., Is white hot or cold?
LMs consider 'white' cold because it's mediated by 'snow'
Ablate the mediators, and you eliminate the associations.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of over 1,000 human brains doing arbitrary tasks A century and a half of neuroscience has yielded many divergent theories of the neurobiology of language. Two factors that likely contribute to this situation include (a) conceptual disagreement…

New brain/language study w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social! We applied task-agnostic individualized functional connectomics (iFC) to the entire history of fMRI scanning in the Fedorenko lab, parcellating nearly 1200 brains into networks based on activity fluctuations alone. doi.org/10.1101/2025... . 🧵

LIT lab is presenting 2 posters at #CNS2025!

Session D - Scaling Laws in Functional Region of Interest (fROI) Analyses by @ruimingao.bsky.social

Session E - Characterizing the effects of content, task and modality on task-driven semantic processing in the brain (sketchpad series) by Jin Li

Key-value memory in the brain Classical models of memory in psychology and neuroscience rely on similarity-based retrieval of stored patterns, where similarity is a function of ret…

Our paper on key-value memory in the brain (updated from the preprint version) is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social
authors.elsevier.com/a/1kqIJ3BtfH...

Excited to introduce funROI: A Python package for functional ROI analyses of fMRI data!

funroi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

#fMRI #Neuroimaging #Python #OpenScience

Work w @neuranna.bsky.social

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🚨 New Preprint!!

LLMs trained on next-word prediction (NWP) show high alignment with brain recordings. But what drives this alignment—linguistic structure or world knowledge? And how does this alignment evolve during training? Our new paper explores these questions. 👇🧵

Woah!

Multiple brain activation patterns for the same perceptual decision-making task - Nature Communications Here, the authors show the brain uses multiple activation patterns to perform the same task. Even the default mode network, which is often inactive during focus, plays a role.

New paper alert! Have you ever looked at single-trial fMRI activation maps? If so, you know that they are super variable. Here we show that the variability is not just noise. In fact, the same task can consistently elicit different activation patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...