Who, what, where... how? Abstract: Humans are the best knowers and learners of the natural world. From infancy, we are sensitive to the who, what, and where in everyday life… but how? In this talk, I will focus on how our intuitive cognitive biases interact with language to support our learning of abstract concepts. In particular, […]
The development, hemispheric organization, and plasticity of high-level vision Adults recognize complex visual inputs, such as faces and words, with remarkable speed, accuracy and ease, but a full understanding of these abilities is still lacking. Much prior research has favoured a binary separation of faces and words, with the right hemisphere specialized for the representation […]
Organizing Dimensions of Language in the Brain How does the human brain encode the meaning of a sentence? I will focus on two studies investigating this question. The first study investigates what kinds of linguistic input the human fronto-temporal language network is most responsive to. By leveraging large language models to identify sentences that maximally […]
The case of Tagalog Case Abstract: In this talk, I revisit the longstanding debate on the nature of the Philippine-type morphosyntactic alignment system, often also referred to as "Austronesian voice". This system is typologically unique in tracking a privileged argument (the "pivot") through affixes on the verb rather than relying solely on nominal case marking […]
A unique neurocognitive reading profile for skilled deaf readers Abstract: Our research is uncovering a deaf-specific neurocognitive reading profile that differs from hearing individuals with equal reading ability. This work focuses on deaf adults who have achieved reading success (despite poor phonological abilities) and who acquired a sign language in early childhood (reducing potential effects […]
Generative (Mental) World Explorer Abstract: Understanding, navigating, and exploring the 3D physical real world has long been a central challenge in the development of artificial intelligence. In this work, we take a step toward this goal by introducing GenEx, a system capable of planning complex embodied world exploration, guided by its generative imagination that forms priors […]
This talk is rescheduled from April 11 to April 18. High-dimensional structure underlying individual differences in naturalistic visual experience.
Linguistic Universals in Grammars and Language Models. (Please take note of the alternate location.)
This talk is rescheduled from April 18 to April 25. Neural computations underlying human social evaluations from visual stimuli Abstract: Humans easily make social evaluations from visual scenes, but the computational mechanisms in the brain that support this ability remain unknown. Here, we test two hypotheses raised by prior work: one proposes that people recognize […]
Rapid unsupervised alignment with the natural image manifold Abstract:There is a stark contrast between the nature of feature learning in biological and artificial vision. While brains learn without explicit supervision and with little data, deep neural networks require supervised feedback and massive training sets. Here we show that a surprisingly simple unsupervised learning algorithm can […]
It is our pleasure to announce Kwan Srijomkwan as this year's 2025 Glushko Outstanding Undergraduate Cognitive Science Prize recipient! Kwan will give a talk entitled "What do we learn when we learn handwriting?" during our Commencement Reception on her undergraduate research. What do we learn when we learn handwriting? Abstract to come.
Hierarchical computations of social interaction perception in the human visual system