Neural representations: From humans to artificial networks and back ABSTRACT: I will discuss various properties of neural representations (dimensionality, spectra, hyperalignments) found in biological brains and show how they can be connected to recent findings in the inner workings of artificial neural networks. I will show results in the context of vision using fMRI data […]
What kind of computation is cognition? Prof. Josh Tenenbaum is a Professor in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Prof. Tenenbaum studies the computational basis of human learning and inference.
It is our pleasure to announce Zihan Wang as the 2023 Glushko Outstanding Undergraduate Cognitive Science Prize recipient! Zihan will give a virtual talk on "Characterizing Complex Spatial Skills: Block Building in Children as an Exemplar Domain." The event link is being circulated among students and affiliates of the department via email only. Inquiries may […]
Students who have received a degree in Cognitive Science in Summer 2022, Fall 2022 or Spring 2023 are invited to celebrate with us and to bring their family and friends along after the University-wide Commencement ceremony. Email invitations have been sent out. RSVP required by May 15th.
Pragmatic inference in spatial language. ABSTRACT: Spatial prepositions left, right, above, below, in, on, and others belong to a closed lexical class, meaning that the same spatial term frequently describes a wide range of spatial relations. As a result, speakers have to make generalizations about what kind of spatial relations can be described with the […]
Structural Representations in Online Syntactic Processing: An Artificial Neural Network Approach. ABSTRACT: Speakers of a language are able to effortlessly determine whether sentences abide by grammatical rules: we instantly know "The dog runs" is a good sentence, but "The dogs runs" is not. Work in syntactic theory suggests that it is necessary to represent complex […]
Brain and Emergence: From Syntergetic Cort to Causal Structure ABSTRACT: Emergence, also known as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts", is a widespread phenomenon in various complex systems. How did the first living cell emerge from the collisions of different molecules in the early Earth's environment? How do large neural language […]
Rethinking Language-Alignment in the Human Visual System Using Controlled Comparisons of Vision-Language Models and Wordplay ABSTRACT: Recent success predicting ventral visual stream responses to images from large language model (LLM) representations of image captions has sparked renewed interest in the possibility that high-level human visual representations are “aligned” to language. In this talk, we’ll further […]
Applications for Spring 2024 admission to the MA in Cognitive Science program are due October 15th.
Associative Memory Contributes to Regular and Irregular English Past Tense Production: Evidence from Williams Syndrome Abstract TBA. Rennie Pasquinelli is a PhD candidate interested in cognitive and linguistic development in typically and atypically developing populations. Current work focuses on the intersection of language acquisition, development, and memory in Williams syndrome.
Making sense of the world: People, places, and THINGS. Abstract: Light falling on the retina triggers neural activity that is propagated along sub-cortical and cortical pathways to ultimately elicit the perceptual experience of a world that is full of people, places, and things. However, much prior research has focused on broad visual distinctions (e.g. scenes, […]
The distributed conceptual network in the human brain. ABSTRACT: Human behavior is based on a complex interaction between perception, stored knowledge, and continuousevaluation of the world relative to plans and goals. Even seemingly simple tasks such as watching a movie orlistening to a story involve a range of different perceptual and cognitive processes whose underlying […]