Two weeks left to apply! MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences is seeking a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working with nonhuman animals in some way. Application deadline is Dec. 1. Full posting: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30586

LLMs get a lot of attention but if you are interested in the original (allegedly) stochastic parrots come to my poster Tuesday where I will present new work on the natural vocal behavior or parrots and its cortical control #Sfn2025 #SfN25

🤖🧠I'll be considering applications for PhD students & postdocs to start at Yale in Fall 2026! If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply! PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_... Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...

New pre-print from our lab, by Lakshmi Govindarajan with help from Sagarika Alavilli, introducing a new type of model for studying sensory uncertainty. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here is a summary. (1/n)

6/ We also wondered: if neuroscientists use functional localizers to map networks in the brain, could we do the same for MiCRo’s experts? The answer: yes! The very same localizers successfully recovered the corresponding expert modules in our models!

🚀 Excited to share a major update to our “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners” (MiCRo) paper! We ask: What benefits can we unlock by designing language models whose inner structure mirrors the brain’s functional specialization? More below 🧠👇 cognitive-reasoners.epfl.ch

Check out @mryskina.bsky.social's talk and poster at COLM on Tuesday—we present a method to identify 'semantically consistent' brain regions (responding to concepts across modalities) and show that more semantically consistent brain regions are better predicted by LLMs.

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Do you want to use AI models to understand human language? Are you fascinated by whether linguistic representations are lurking in LLMs? Are you in need of a richer model of spatial words across languages? Consider UT Austin for all your Computational Linguistics Ph.D. needs! mahowak.github.io

Elizabeth Lee, a first-year Ph.D. student in Neural Computation, has been awarded CMU’s 2025 Sutherland-Merlino Fellowship. Her work bridges neuroscience and machine learning, and she’s passionate about advancing STEM access for underrepresented groups. www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-eve...

🚨 Paper alert: To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models 📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091... 🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io

Come be our colleague at EPFL! Several open calls for positions 🧪🧠🤖 * Neuroscience www.epfl.ch/about/workin... (deadline Oct 1) * Life Science Engineering www.epfl.ch/about/workin... * CS general call www.epfl.ch/about/workin... * Learning Sciences www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

Now that the ICLR deadline is behind us, happy to share that From Language to Cognition has been accepted as an Oral at #EMNLP2025! 🎉 Looking forward to seeing many of you in Suzhou 🇨🇳

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

Are there conceptual directions in VLMs that transcend modality? Check out our COLM oral spotlight 🔦 paper! We use SAEs to analyze the multimodality of linear concepts in VLMs with @chloesu07.bsky.social, @thomasfel.bsky.social, @shamkakade.bsky.social and Stephanie Gil arxiv.org/abs/2504.11695

Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737

I thought I wouldn‘t be one of those academics super into outreach talks, but I just put together something about understanding LLMs for laypeople and I get to talk about results that I don’t really focus on in any of my technical talks! It’s actually really cool. I made this lil takeaway slide

✨ Do self-supervised speech models learn to encode language-specific linguistic features from their training data, or only more language-general acoustic correlates? At #Interspeech2025 we presented our new Wav2Vec2-NL model and SSL-NL evaluation dataset to test this! 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00981 ⬇️

So, what is #EurIPS anyway? 🤔 EurIPS is a community-driven conference taking place in Copenhagen Denmark endorsed by @neuripsconf.bsky.social and @nordicair.bsky.social and co-developed with @ellis.eu, where you can additionally present your NeurIPS papers.

Had such a great time presenting our tutorial on Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models at #Interspeech2025! 🔍 For anyone looking for an introduction to the topic, we've now uploaded all materials to the website: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter...

Wanted to share a new version (much cleaner!) of a preprint on how connectivity structure shapes collective dynamics in nonlinear RNNs. Neural circuits have highly non-iid connectivity (e.g., rapidly decaying singular values, structured singular-vector overlaps), unlike classical random RNN models.

I’m recruiting committee members for the Technical Program Committee at #CCN2026. Please apply if you want to help make submission, review & selection of contributed work (Extended Abstracts & Proceedings) more useful for everyone! 🌐 Helps to have: programming/communications/editorial experience.

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

In our new paper, we explore how we can build encoding models that are both powerful and understandable. Our model uses an LLM to answer 35 questions about a sentence's content. The answers linearly contribute to our prediction of how the brain will respond to that sentence. 1/6

Action potential 👉 3 faculty opportunities to join EPFL neuroscience 1. Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Neuroscience go.epfl.ch/neurofaculty, 2. Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Life Sciences Engineering, or 3. Associate Professor (tenured) in Life Sciences Engineering go.epfl.ch/LSEfaculty

🤖 🧠 NEW PAPER ON COGSCI & AI 🧠 🤖 Recent neural networks capture properties long thought to require symbols: compositionality, productivity, rapid learning So what role should symbols play in theories of the mind? For our answer...read on! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776 1/n

Somewhat exhausted but very happily and proudly looking back at #CCN2025 & ready to pass the torch to NEW Amsterdam for #CCN2026 🥳Please fill out the survey 👇 to give input to the organizing team led by @neurograce.bsky.social and @toddgureckis.bsky.social @NYU!

whelp, they changed the link: news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Are similar representations in neural nets evidence of shared computation? In new theory work w/ Lukas Braun (lukasbraun.com) & @saxelab.bsky.social, we prove that representational comparisons are ill-posed in general, unless networks are efficient. @icmlconf.bsky.social @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Our #CCN2025 GAC debate w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, Gemma Roig (www.cvai.cs.uni-frankfurt.de), Jacqueline Gottlieb (gottlieblab.com), Klaus Oberauer, @mschrimpf.bsky.social &‬ @brittawestner.bsky.social asks: 📊 What benchmarks are useful for cognitive science? 💭 2025.ccneuro.org/gac

Can't wait for #CCN2025! Drop by to say hi to me / collaborators!

Looking forward to #CogSci2025 ! Find us throughout the conference

Heading to CogSci this week! ✈️ Find me giving talks on: 💬 Prod-comp asymmetry in children and LMs (Thu 7/31) 💬 How people make sense of nonsense (Sat 8/2) 📣 Also, I’m recruiting grad students + postdocs for my new lab at Hopkins! 📣 If you’re interested in language / cognition / AI, let’s chat! 😄

Thrilled to announce our symposium, Cognitively Inspired Interpretability inn Large Neural Networks, at #CogSci2025 featuring @taylorwwebb.bsky.social, Ellie Pavlick, Jiahai Feng, Gustaw Opielka, ‪‪@claires012345.bsky.social‬, and Idan Blank!

Very excited to be joining the Kempner Institute this fall as a Research Fellow—and to be part of this amazing cohort and the broader Kempner/Harvard community! Please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Excited to announce the first workshop on CogInterp: Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models @ NeurIPS 2025! 📣 How can we interpret the algorithms and representations underlying complex behavior in deep learning models? 🌐 coginterp.github.io/neurips2025/ 1/4

Cats like to sleep on the left www.cell.com/current-biol...

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Everyone loves causal interp. It’s coherently defined! It makes testable predictions about mechanistic interventions! But what if we had a different objective: predicting model behavior not under mechanistic interventions, but on unseen input data?

@cogscikid.bsky.social has cool new work, in collaboration with Honglak Lee and Sam Hall-McMaster, on how humans solve multitask reinforcement learning problems by preemptively simulating paths to counterfactual goals: arxiv.org/abs/2507.05561 He also shows that it works on challenging ML tasks.

Check out Zaid's open "Podcast" ECoG dataset for natural language comprehension (w/ Hasson Lab). The paper is now out at Scientific Data (nature.com/articles/s41...) and the data are available on OpenNeuro (openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...).

Using in silico neuroscience, @alessandrogifford.bsky.social et al. developed a neural control algorithm to modulate the representational relationships between visual cortical areas, revealing how these areas jointly represent the world as an interconnected network. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The New England Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, NEMI 2025 is August 22 in Boston. Talks, posters, meals, discussion... Most of all, an excellent chance to chat about new ideas with other great researchers in the field! Help spread the word - register and repost - bsky.app/profile/koy...

my lab (lacns.github.io) at @mpi-nl.bsky.social and @dondersinst.bsky.social is recruiting for two PhD and two postdoctoral positions funded by an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator - come join us! PhD: www.mpi.nl/career-educa... Postdoc: www.mpi.nl/career-educa... (please share widely)

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?)

The Kempner Institute congratulates its research fellows Isabel Papadimitriou (@isabelpapad.bsky.social) and Jenn Hu for their faculty appointments and celebrates their innovative research. Read more here: bit.ly/448heBy #AI #LLMs

Excited to share this project specifying a research direction I think will be particularly fruitful for theory-driven cognitive science that aims to explain natural behavior! We're calling this direction "Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science"

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n

The @interspeech.bsky.social early registration deadline is coming up in a few days! Want to learn how to analyze the inner workings of speech processing models? 🔍 Check out the programme for our tutorial: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter... & sign up through the conference registration form!

NEUROCOG 2025 is taking place in Brussels Nov 17–18! The theme: AI and the Human Brain 🤖 🧠 We’re thrilled to welcome 6 amazing invited speakers: @evfedorenko.bsky.social, @nicoschuck.bsky.social, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @jeffreybowers.bsky.social, @irisgroen.bsky.social & @mtoneva.bsky.social