Every token is a vector in the residual stream; string them together and you get a trajectory. We measured how sharply this path bends (its curvature) in different layers and asked: Do tangled paths produce flatter, more uncertain next-token distributions? (3/n)

Pleased to share that our MEG and eye-tracking study of visual memory formation, saccades, & alpha oscillations is now published (as a Featured Article!) in the Journal of Neuroscience! Full paper here: doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... w/ Jed Meltzer @drjenryan.bsky.social @rosannaolsen.bsky.social

A bit late but I've been reappointed after passing my 4th year review! 2 reviews down, 1 to go. This means that in fall I'll be on something of a pre-tenure sabbatical. If your department is looking for fall speakers & you think my work might be of interest, I'd welcome opportunities to give talks.

Remember Chomsky's arguments about language innateness based on its putative un-learnability? Those arguments hinge on a pretty crazy theory of grammar. Here is Ted Gibson's summary of the original claims and a proposed solution in the form of dependency grammar: tinyurl.com/yzjrpbb8

We're happy to release NeuralSet: a simple, fast, scalable package for Neuro-AI Supports: 🧠 fMRI, EEG, MEG, iEEG, spikes… preprocessing 💬 text 🔊 audio ▶️ video 🏞️ image… embeddings 📦 pip install neuralset 🔍 facebookresearch.github.io/neuroai/neur... 📄 kingjr.github.io/files/neural... 🧵 Details👇

Richard @futrell.bsky.social and I have posted our response to the commentaries on our BBS target article "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models." The response is: "You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!" arxiv.org/abs/2604.09501

The Bayesian Workflow book is coming! statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/04/16/t...

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels. The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them. We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.

How children remember time changes dramatically as they grow up & understanding that shift matters more than you might think. Two new papers from the lab's newest PhD, Dr. Owen Friend, explore what that difference looks like & what it tells us about the developing brain 🧠

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... "mental imagery reactivates the same sensory codes used during visual stimuli, suggesting the existence of a generative model capable of synthesizing detailed sensory contents from an abstract, semantic representation."

Really excited about our new work on aphasia! Even in fairly profound aphasia, we can recover semantic maps through visual stimuli and use them to decode language. This is a big step! Language BCIs in aphasia might be possible!

Using time-resolved EEG/MEG decoding?🧠 Here’s a new approach! No feature engineering (decode from raw signals), but capturing info that standard decoding often misses (oscillatory/aperiodic activity, connectivity). Lightweight, INTERPRETABLE, and easy to use. (1/6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A Suite of LMs Comprehend Puzzle Statements as Well or Better Than Humans By Supantho Rakshit, Jennifer Hu, Kyle Mahowald, Adele E. Goldberg

Happy to share our new preprint: Uncovering the representational geometry of durations Is time represented along a single mental timeline? We combine behaviour + EEG to show that duration is organised in a richer, multidimensional space. w/ @lnalborczyk.bsky.social & @virginievanw.bsky.social

New paper led by @jsrozner.bsky.social proposing and validating a way of studying LM representations as conduits for learning. Infect a model by training it on an adversarial example and trace the impacts on behavior. This has lots of perks explained in Josh's thread.

Excited for #HSP2026! LInC Lab has a busy Saturday! 🧠🗣️ 🖼️ Posters: • Olivia Gawel on memory & noisy-channel inference • Tevin Williams on linguistic alignment & memory for conversation 🎤 Talk: • Yours truly on eye-tracking & real-time noisy-channel inference Come chat/give feedback! 👋

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Language, Intelligence & Thought lab is looking for a lab manager! This is a 2-year postbac position that will allow you to gain experience in human neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI research prior to applying to PhD programs. Express interest here: forms.gle/npXEGUjGUbp5...

I am thrilled to announce that our group has received a new grant from the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation to study the neural dynamics of vocal learning in children! I am looking for a postdoc to join us in this effort, currently funded for 2 years. Please reach out with CV and letter of interest.

We have three lectureships available at York Psychology (@yorkpsychology.bsky.social) with a broad remit for research/teaching areas. Home and overseas applications are welcome. Deadline for applications is early April - enquiries welcome. Come and join us! jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...

I’m excited to share our new work, led by grad student Rajvi Agravat, using iEEG in 54 pediatric, adolescent, & young adult participants with deep neural network audio source separation to show how the brain prioritizes speech in audio containing both speech and music www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to announce a new paper from our lab, by Ian Griffith @iangriffith.bsky.social with help from Preston Hess @phess2.bsky.social, introducing a model of attentional selection. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @mitbcs.bsky.social @mitscience.bsky.social Here is a summary. (1/n)

🧠🧪🧵1/37 Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Evidence against syntactic encapsulation in large language models onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Congratulations @judithfan.bsky.social on winning the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for early-career contributions to Cognitive Science 🥳 Amazing!! cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-pri...

What is the interplay between representations learned from (language) surface forms alone, and those learned from more grounded evidence (e.g.,vision)? Excited to share new work understanding “Cross-modal taxonomic generalization” in (V)LMs arxiv.org/abs/2603.07474 1/

What if you could automatically transcribe children's speech sounds from their first babbles to full sentences? Screening for speech delays. Comparing how kids learn to talk across languages. Following how sounds evolve month by month. We're building toward this with BabAR🧵 (sound on 🔊)

RIP redundancy reduction? Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Of all the analogies, this one about horses is the dumbest.

The canvas() function from the ggview R package is very useful for previewing/tweaking a ggplot into publication-ready format: it renders a plot "as it would appear if saved to a file with the specified dimensions". cran.r-project.org/web/packages... #RStats #ggplot #ggview

Fantastic tool for teaching about neural networks!

My group is hiring a full time research coordinator to work with our collaborators in Houston on understanding speech and language development in children with epilepsy. Great for folks looking to get direct experience with clinical/translational research. Please repost! jobs.bcm.edu/job/Research...

📣 Check out how verb-specific knowledge updates incrementally as distributional learning takes place: our first paper on prediction and learning (with Amanda Owen Van Horne @telllab.bsky.social and Yi-Lun Weng) is out!

📣📣📣Job alert Multimodal Language Department Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics MAX PLANCK RESEARCH GROUP LEADER POSITION (W2 BBESG) lnkd.in/eaq5MW9a

Interested in using my textbook, Modeling Social Behavior, but wishing code was in a more general programming language than NetLogo? The incomparable Ben Fried has translated all modeling code into JULIA, utilizing the excellent Agents.jl package. github.com/BenjaFried/m...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

I always thought preschoolers were too egocentric to do well on communication tasks where they had to talk about novel referents. Old papers reported they'd say stuff like "this one looks like my uncle's hat." @vboyce.bsky.social shows that this is wrong! osf.io/preprints/ps...

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇 Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic! Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

AI agents are becoming a serious threat to research data quality. Today we’re rolling out Bot authenticity checks on @joinprolific.bsky.social, detecting agentic AI with 100% accuracy in testing. Comes with a native Qualtrics integration! More info: www.prolific.com/resources/in...

Out today! "How Does a Deep Neural Network Look at Lexical Stress in English Words?" w/ I. Allouche, I. Asael, R. Rousso, V. Dassa, A. Bradlow, S.-E. Kim & @keshet.bsky.social doi.org/10.1121/10.0... 1/

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings: "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Polite Greeting Name Relevant Personal Link Manage Expectations Keep it BRIEF.

This study was an amazing collaborative experience. I'm really really grateful to all the wonderful people who contributed and made this happen. It's the closest I have ever come to finding something like a "universal" in human cognition.

Recently published in @nature.com :the human brain stores what happened and the context in mostly separate neurons—binding them only when needed, which enables flexible memory (and hopefully avoids confusion) 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

How do diverse context structures reshape representations in LLMs? In our new work, we explore this via representational straightening. We found LLMs are like a Swiss Army knife: they select different computational mechanisms reflected in different representational structures. 1/

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

The cerebellum supports high-level language?? Now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social, we systematically examined language-responsive areas of the cerebellum using precision fMRI and identified a *cerebellar satellite* of the neocortical language network! authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUU83BtfH... 1/n 🧵👇

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap. dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D... Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...