🚨 New preprint! 🚨 1/ Can word usage help us infer what novel concepts look like? New work on zero-shot learning in humans with Marco Marelli & Sharon Thompson-Schill! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

We are hiring! New PhD position starting later this year. The call will open soon: write us for more information! bravenewword.unimib.it/prospective-...

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Made-up non-words produce semantic brain activity "comparable to that of existing words, provided that novel words contain a concatenation of identifiable morphemes." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... This is a bluty result, but not too jarfish if you doot ahugeapun, no?

Truly enjoyed hosting @bottinilab.bsky.social and his team for our joint lab meeting. A fantastic three-day exchange where everyone shared their research and explored new ideas together. Here is Roberto Bottini’s seminar on cognitive maps: www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3iv...

How do we navigate our #memory maps of spatial & non-spatial experience? This study shows that the #EntorhinalCortex not only encodes the structure of experience, but also actions in conceptual space, and these representations are reflected in #gaze behavior @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4czCPHk

How do cognitive maps guide our actions in both spatial and conceptual worlds? Seminar by Roberto Bottini (CIMeC, UniTrento) on hippocampal–entorhinal systems and conceptual navigation. 🗓️ Wed, April 15 | 3:30 PM 📍 Bicocca (U6 - Sala Lauree) 🌐 Online: meet.google.com/yne-wucy-uju

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

arxiv.org/abs/2601.11432 I want to share an astonishing result. LLMs can "translate" Jabberwocky' texts like 'He dwushed a ghanc zawk” & even and even 'In the BLANK BLANK, BLANK BLANK has BLANK over any BLANK BLANK’s BLANK' This has profound consequence for thinking about.. 1/2

@matildellen.bsky.social bravely decided to do a registered report with @pci-regreports.bsky.social as the first manuscript of her PhD -- 2+ years later, it's out! It's on how bilingualism affects statistical word learning, and the results were quite unexpected. Read more:

Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠 w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)

A fascinating read in @theguardian.com on the psycholinguistics of swearing! Did you know Germans averaged 53 taboo words, while Brits e Spaniards listed only 16? Great to see the work of our colleague Simone Sulpizio & Jon Andoni Duñabeitia highlighted! 👏 www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Important fMRI/RSA study by @marcociapparelli.bsky.social et al. Compositional (multiplicative) representations of compounds/phrases in left IFG (BA45), mSTS, ATL; left AG encodes constituents, not their composition, weighing the right element more, vice versa IFG 🧠🧩 academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

Happy to share that our work on semantic composition is out now -- open access -- in Cerebral Cortex! With Marco Marelli (@ercbravenewword.bsky.social), @wwgraves.bsky.social & @carloreve.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

I am incredibly proud to share my first, first-author paper as a postdoc with @benhayden.bsky.social . How does the human hippocampus, known for encoding concepts, represent the meanings of words while listening to narrative speech? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here's a set of new results from my lab asking how the brain combines different ideas (concepts)! Now in press at J of Cog Neuro, we looked at how semantic composition (combining different concepts together) shapes brain activity. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence

I'm sharing a Colab notebook on using large language models for cognitive science! GitHub repo: github.com/MarcoCiappar... It's geared toward psychologists & linguists and covers extracting embeddings, predictability measures, comparing models across languages & modalities (vision). see examples 🧵

I’d like to share some slides and code for a “Memory Model 101 workshop” I gave recently, which has some minimal examples to illustrate the Rumelhart network & catastrophic interference :) slides: shorturl.at/q2iKq code (with colab support!): github.com/qihongl/demo...

🚨New preprint!🚨 1/7 Happy to share new work with Marco Marelli, @wwgraves.bsky.social & @carloreve.bsky.social! We re-analyze fMRI studies to identify which regions represent semantic information compositionally, and what operations best describe composition. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

another day another minicons update (potentially a significant one for psycholinguists?) "Word" scoring is now a thing! You just have to supply your own splitting function! pip install -U minicons for merriment

🚀 My first PhD paper is out! 🚀 "How do multiple meanings affect word learning and remapping?" was published in Memory & Cognition! Big thanks to my supervisors and co-authors (Iring Koch & @troembke.bsky.social). Curious? Read it here: rdcu.be/eeY9o #CognitivePsychology #WordLearning #Bilingualism

1/n Happy to share a new paper with Calogero Zarbo & Marco Marelli! How well do LLMs represent the implicit meaning of familiar and novel compounds? How do they compare with simpler distributional semantics models (DSMs; i.e., word embeddings)? doi.org/10.1111/cogs...