Brown Bag Talk: Paul Soulos

111 Krieger Hall 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD, United States

Differentiable Tree Operations Promote Compositional Generalization. ABSTRACT: In the context of structure to structure transformation tasks, sequences of discrete symbolic operations (e.g., op codes or programs) are an important tool but are difficult to learn due to their non-differentiability. To support learning sequences of symbolic operations, we propose a differentiable tree interpreter which compiles high-level […]

Colloquium: Brice Menard

111 Krieger Hall 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD, United States

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 […]

Colloquium: Josh Tenenbaum

170 Krieger Hall 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, Maryland

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.

Glushko Talk by Zihan Wang

Online/Zoom

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 […]

Dissertation Talk: Natalia Talmina

111 Krieger Hall 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD, United States

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 […]

Dissertation Talk: Suhas Arehalli

111 Krieger Hall 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD, United States

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 […]

Event Series Brown Bag Talks

Brown Bag Talk: Yingqi Rong

111 Krieger Hall 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD, United States

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 […]

PhD Application Mentoring

A group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from the Department of Cognitive Science, are offering one-on-one mentoring about applying to our PhD program in Cognitive Science. The priority deadline is November 5th but the request form will remain open until November 15th. Find out more.

Event Series Brown Bag Talks

Brown Bag Talk: Colin Conwell

111 Krieger Hall 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD, United States

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 […]