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 […]
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, […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lateralization of Social Interaction Perception. ABSTRACT: Social perception emerges early, occurs automatically, and is used ubiquitously in daily life. Understanding its neural underpinnings is critical to cognitive neuroscience. A region in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) that selectively supports social interaction perception has been found by contrasting brain responses to interacting and non-interacting […]
Development of relational reasoning: When do children pass the Relational Match-to-Sample task? ABSTRACT: Relational ability—the ability to compare situations or ideas and discover common relations – is a key process in higher-order cognition that underlies transfer in learning and creative problem solving. For this reason, it has generated intense interest both among developmentalists and in […]
Selection in Written Language Production: Evidence from Aphasia ABSTRACT: Most models of word production assume that in the process of producing a target word, multiple distractors also get activated, both other words (at the lexical level) and other phonemes/letters (at the segmental level). Thus, a selection mechanism is needed to select the targets at each […]