Delighted Sasha's (first year PhD!) work using mech interp to study complex syntax constructions won an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP! Also delighted the ACL community continues to recognize unabashedly linguistic topics like filler-gaps... and the huge potential for LMs to inform such topics!

Excited to share our work on mechanisms of naturalistic audiovisual processing in the human brain 🧠🎬!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

NEW: The Trump admin just ended the practice of automatically extending work permits when people file to renew them — meaning that if USCIS takes too long to process a renewal the applicant loses their authorization to work legally. The interim final rule applies to renewals filed after tomorrow.

🤖📈 How do LLMs use their depth? Akshat Gupta led a fun project to find out! We leverage TunedLens (~linear decoding of tokens) to explore how LLMs' internal representations change from layer to layer. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2510.18871 1/

Finally out in TACL: 🌎EWoK (Elements of World Knowledge)🌎: A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models tl;dr: LLMs learn basic social concepts way easier than physical&spatial concepts Paper: direct.mit.edu/tacl/article... Website: ewok-core.github.io

Why do brain networks vary? Do these differences shape behavior? If every 🧠 is unique, how can we detect common features of brain organization? @rodbraga.bsky.social and I dig in, in @annualreviews.bsky.social (ahead of print): go.illinois.edu/Gratton2025-... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #MedSky 🧵👇

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ammar I. Marvi, Nancy G. Kanwisher, et al: An efficient multifunction fMRI localizer for high-level visual, auditory, and cognitive regions in humans doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets! We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it! 1/

Excited to share new work with @hleemasson.bsky.social , Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and @lisik.bsky.social! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: osf.io/b5p4n 1/n

ChatGPT is surprisingly bad at generating / explaining garden path sentences, and my students, who had a garden path question on their homework, will soon find that out 😅

Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...

The lateral prefrontal cortex 🧠— which we think of as critical for goal driven behavior + is a target for psychiatric treatments— is fundamentally different in individuals relative to the group averages we’ve often studied. 👇see preprint and thread, led by Zach Ladwig #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Many thanks to the volunteer organizers and the flash talk presenters for making the CCN watch party at Georgia Tech a success! And thanks all attendees for coming and engaging in discussions!

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

They just changed the room for our session on language and intelligence this afternoon to ***Salon 7*** . Find me there at 1pm PT #cogsci2025

Very excited that the Society for the Neurobiology of Language will be holding our annual meeting at Gallaudet University in September. In preparation check out my starter pack on language researchers, and let me know if you’d like to be added! #SNL25 go.bsky.app/6iumPee

1/7 If you're at CogSci 2025, I'd love to see you at my talk on Friday 1pm PDT in Nob Hill A! I'll be talking about our work towards an implemented computational model of noisy-channel comprehension (with @postylem.bsky.social, Ted Gibson, and @rplevy.bsky.social).

Very excited to be presenting my work "Estimating and Correcting Yes-No Bias in Language Models" (done with @neuranna.bsky.social) at the poster session @ #CogSci2025 today! Please come check it out starting 1pm 🙏🏻! Poster | Paper

Looking forward to #CogSci2025 ! Find us throughout the conference

Atlanta community: we are organizing a CCN @cogcompneuro.bsky.social watch party! Watch the talks, engage in structured discussions, and (optionally) present your own work. Register: forms.gle/AWxVPbrgxkdd... Schedule: tinyurl.com/ccn2025atlanta

So far we have CCN local meetups @ NYC @neurograce.bsky.social, Boston @lynnkasorensen.bsky.social, Atlanta @neuranna.bsky.social, Lyon and Bucharest! Who will host one on even further away from Amsterdam (West Coast? East Asia? Africa?)

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

Heading over to #APS25DC ! Excited to talk about language, cognition, world knowledge and LLMs Friday @ 6pm. If you want to chat 1:1, feel free to reach out!

Researchers paid $9 billion over 5 years for their findings to be freely accessible. This is based on a study of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551

Many processes from industry are not appropriate or overkill for an academic setting, but we can and should be doing better than we currently are. Our paper tries to give practical advice on how you can improve your scientific workflow, without being a coding guru. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

As a psych undergrad in St. Petersburg 6 years ago, I never imagined I’d be starting my own cognitive science lab at one of the world’s best research environments. I’m beyond excited to share that I’ll be starting a Cognitive Epistemology Lab at @BerkeleyPsych in Fall 2026!

I might be able to hire a postdoc for this fall in computational linguistics at UT Austin. Topics in the general LLM + cognitive space (particularly reasoning, chain of thought, LLMs + code) and LLM + linguistic space. If this could be of interest, feel free to get in touch!

✨New paper ✨ Introducing 🌍MultiBLiMP 1.0: A Massively Multilingual Benchmark of Minimal Pairs for Subject-Verb Agreement, covering 101 languages! We present over 125,000 minimal pairs and evaluate 17 LLMs, finding that support is still lacking for many languages. 🧵⬇️

Excited to share new work on the language system! Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/ Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread below!👇🧵

Enjoyed giving a talk this morning at the "Intelligence: from AI to the brain and back" conference, taking place today at Georgia Tech!

A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of over 1,000 human brains doing arbitrary tasks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.29.646067v1

LIT lab is presenting 2 posters at #CNS2025! Session D - Scaling Laws in Functional Region of Interest (fROI) Analyses by @ruimingao.bsky.social Session E - Characterizing the effects of content, task and modality on task-driven semantic processing in the brain (sketchpad series) by Jin Li

We're hosting a hackathon in May! This is aimed at jsPsych users who want to learn how to contribute to open source software and extend jsPsych. It's free, and we'll cover travel expenses. Learn more and sign up here: jspsych.github.io/hackathon/sp...

Dean Chemerinsky and other #lawschool deans "speak as legal educators, responsible for training the next generation of lawyers, in condemning any government efforts to punish lawyers or their firms based on the identity of their clients or for their zealous lawful and ethical advocacy."

I’m hiring a full-time lab tech for two years starting May/June. Strong coding skills required, ML a plus. Our research on the human brain uses fMRI, ANNs, intracranial recording, and behavior. A great stepping stone to grad school. Apply here: careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl... ......

Come and become my colleague! Georgia Tech has a non-tenure track Academic Professional position in Neuroscience. This is a great environment with neuro exploding on campus, and Atlanta is an awesome place to live. DM me with questions. careers.hprod.onehcm.usg.edu/psc/careers/...

I loved working on this with @lasha.bsky.social, she is such a star and is on the job market! 🌟 Check out the paper to learn about a new method of probing models for their training data, *agnostic to the text's genre*. Intuition: find surprising tokens, mask them, and prompt the model to fill in.

Have you ever wished there was an easy way to run functional ROI analyses in Python? Look no more! Presenting 🧠funROI🧠 A massive effort from @ruimingao.bsky.social, with a demo and docs included for easy usage. BIDS and nilearn-based! See her thread We welcome your feedback! #fMRI #neuroskyence 🧪

Cognitive Ontology by Colin Klein: https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.6ddb1c41

Professor Keanan Joyner’s journey into addiction research began in his Georgia 🍑 high school AP Psychology class, leading to a life-changing NIH-funded research position. He writes, “Georgia’s future is at stake”. 🧪🏠 @keananjoyner.bsky.social www.ajc.com/opinion/kean...

Check out our new work on introspection in LLMs! 🔍 TL;DR we find no evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own knowledge. Beyond the study of LLM introspection, our findings inform an ongoing debate in linguistics research: prompting (eg grammaticality judgments) =/= prob measurement!

Biologist William Booker recalls growing up as a science student in Georgia 🍑: ‘Becoming a practitioner of these fields was seen as an achievement, and this sentiment led me to believe my community thought science was worth investing in.’ Now, those investments are at risk. 🧪🏠

🚨 New Preprint!! LLMs trained on next-word prediction (NWP) show high alignment with brain recordings. But what drives this alignment—linguistic structure or world knowledge? And how does this alignment evolve during training? Our new paper explores these questions. 👇🧵

🚨 Neuromatch Academy Course Applications are OPEN for 2025!! 🚨 Get your application in early to be a student or teaching assistant for this year’s courses! Applications are due Sunday, March 23. Apply & learn more: neuromatch.io/courses/ #mlsky #compneurosky #ai #climatesolutions #ScienceEdu 🧪

The Red Queen believed "6 impossible things before breakfast." But what about *inconceivable* things? For your breakfast read, check out the new preprint: "Shades of Zero: Distinguishing Impossibility from Inconceivability" (by @jennhu.bsky.social , Sosa, & me) arxiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20469

I wouldn’t be a scientist without the NIH SIP. I was a pre-med going through the motions but my summer at the NIH captivated me & showed me a different path. I was overjoyed when the first trainee from my own lab went last summer & also had a magical experience. This is a devastating loss

Within-Individual Precision Mapping of Brain Networks Exclusively Using Task Data https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.25.640090v1

Please RT - join us in Atlanta May 17-18 for the Conference for Research and Education in Navigation! Feat. navigation + space-related research (from human and animal expt. models to architectural design, robotics, and artificial agent memory and behavior) gatech.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...