Can the adult brain acquire typical representations after missing an essential early-life experience? New work with Marge Livingstone: “Early face deprivation leads to long-lasting deficits in cortical face processing”. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Curious how the face-processing system recovers when early face experience is missing? Come see me present new data on recovery and limits of plasticity at #SfN2025 @sfn.org on Tues, Nov 18 at 10:45 am (SDCC Rm 33)! www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21171...

These findings suggest that the predictive power of LMss for human visual cortex responses is not due to the evolution or learning of language per se, but rather reflects the statistical structure of the visual world as captured by natural language www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 6/6

New preprint “Monkey See, Model Knew: LLMs accurately predict visual responses in humans AND NHPs” Led by Colin Conwell with @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social Akshay Jagadeesh, Kasper Vinken @amrahs-inolas.bsky.social @jacob-prince.bsky.social George Alvarez @taliakonkle.bsky.social & Marge Livingstone 1/n

Our new work is out in @NatureComms! rdcu.be/d0ea2. Face cells are pareidolia-selective, but this selectivity 1) is not explained by human ratings, 2) did not require a face-like configuration, but was 3) driven by local features 4) explained by features present in non-pareidolia nonface objects.