A hale and hearty "huzzah!" to MIT Picower Institute's Steve Flavell. A well-deserved honor. Steve asks big systems-level integrative questions in a reductionist system. Wicked cool work. picower.mit.edu/news/hhmi-hono…

From banana farming to computational neuroscience, Mehrdad Jazayeri has taken an unusual path to MIT. Learn more about his journey, his fascinating research, and his future plans as a newly appointed #HHMIInvestigator👇 mcgovern.mit.edu/2024/07/23/meh… MIT Science MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences

The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is now live! oecs.mit.edu OECS an online, open resource about the nature of minds—what they are, how they grow, how they interact, and how they differ from one another. At #CogSci2024? Come along to Penn II, 12.15 The MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social

Can LMs serve as cognitive models of human language processing? Humans make syntactic agreement errors ("the key to the cabinets are rusty"). Suhas Arehalli and I tested if the errors documented in six human studies emerge in LMs. They... sometimes did. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/d…

So much new and exciting work -- from LLMs to VSAs -- reshapes the science of concepts. See our new Trends in Cognitive Sciences review on why vector-based models might just be what we need, and why a successful theory of human concepts no longer seems out of reach. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

MITの認知言語学者のGibson先生(Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT )が来日してらしたので、お話を聞きに行きました。 面白かったのでちょっと内容を共有すると↓

Our review on Language in Brains, Minds, and Machines (with Nancy Kanwisher @[email protected] Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦) is now officially published and the volume is OPEN access! annualreviews.org/content/journa…

My lab and collaborators are hiring for several positions, postdocs through lab staff (typically people between undergrad and maybe grad school). If you are interested in any of: fieldwork, probability, number learning, algorithms, cognitive modeling -- please get in touch!

New paper w/ Frank Mollica, Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT in PNAS! “Even laypeople use legalese” Corpus analysis + experiments suggest lawyers use legalese to sound authoritative, an account we dub the magic spell hypothesis Full paper tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website… MIT News news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study… 1/

Today our lab had its first meeting, and then I taught my first solo class (>100 people), all on my 30th birthday! New beginnings, let’s go 🚀

Researchers in MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences believe the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study…

I'm excited to announce that I'm joining Northeastern University's Psychology Department this fall as an Assistant Teaching Professor! I'm located at the new(ish) Oakland campus - formerly Mills College. Can't wait to get started! 😁

Stanford Linguistics is hiring!!! We have an open area, open rank faculty position! Apply here: facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/4947…

Linguistics @ Princeton is hiring 2 open-rank faculty: one in syntax/pragmatics/semantics and another in computational work. Modern empirical linguists PLEASE apply! puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/apply… . .

Regev, Casto et al. show how neural populations in the language network process information over different timescales. nature.com/articles/s4156…

🚨New paper!🚨My first (co)first-authored paper is now out in Nature Human Behaviour! We show that neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows rdcu.be/dR0sz co-led w/ Tamar Regev 1/ 🧵

My own take on this debate re our recent PNAS letter and the DGL response: there are important and deep questions raised about the difference between models’ abilities to do tasks and their knowledge of language. Thread.

Exciting new work Nature Communications led by Josh Rule on how to model human learning symbolically. The new model out-performs key alternatives, including a code generation LLM and previous symbolic models. nature.com/articles/s4146…

📢 I am excited to share that I will start a postdoc position working with Dr.Cory Shain ([email protected]) on some cool projects related to computational neuroscience and language processing. Can't wait to explore this new area and explore the lively community at Stanford and in California!

📣 Our new theory paper "Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence" w/ Robert Hawkins & Rick Dale is now live! We introduce 2 powerful feedback loops 🔄 that link individual cognition 🧠to cultural evolution 🏛️➡️🏙️ via group dynamics 🤝direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/d…