Just finished Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." Got me thinking of some figures/animations I find particularly informative (and pleasing to view). This one is especially cool, and one I often think about!

How does the human brain represent semantic information from different languages? Our new preprint suggests that bilingual language comprehension relies on shared semantic representations that are systematically modulated by each language! 1/n

76 years ago this week Claude Shannon ushered in the field of information theory with his paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", which has been cited over 100,000 times: bit.ly/2H0ZxvR (v/SIAM)

1/ New work! Localizing the human language network in ~3.5 minutes using speeded reading. Co-led with Elizabeth L, and with Aalok Sathe आलोक साठे Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦 Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Code: rb.gy/x2rjzj

There’s a lot of exiting new developments happening in language sciences. Roger Levy, Kara Federmeier @CABlabUIUC, & Christopher Manning recently organized a wonderful U.S. National Science Foundation workshop on New Horizons in Language Science: Large Language Models, Language Structure, and the Cognitive and

Some thoughts on how to think about "world models" in language models and beyond: lingo.csail.mit.edu/blog/world_mod…

Have you ever wondered what’s going on in a baby’s brain when she looks at you? I have! So, Rebecca Saxe and I set out to investigate.

Happy to see this work led by Zaid Zada now published in Neuron! We use LLM embeddings to capture word-by-word linguistic content transmitted from the speaker's brain to the listener's brain in real-time, face-to-face conversations: cell.com/neuron/fulltex…

Thanks Nature Rev Neurosci for the chance to clarify that1️⃣the language network is not monolithic (we never said it was, but happy to emphasize); and2️⃣language network boundaries don't depend on a specific 'localizer' and can be recovered from task-free data: tinyurl.com/5y3rhfrh

🚨New paper!🚨My first (co)first-authored paper is now out in Nature Human Behaviour! We show that neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows rdcu.be/dR0sz co-led w/ Tamar Regev 1/ 🧵

Excited to have been named one of MIT Technology Review's 35 under 35! I am happy that, these days, language & human cognition are topics that the world cares deeply about (thanks to recent developments in AI). Not only are these topics impactful, they are also fun to study!

*TWO* job searches Emory Psychology ‼️ Open rank Neural Mechanisms of Behavior in Small Animal Systems apply.interfolio.com/153594 Assoc/Asst Professor, Clinical Science apply.interfolio.com/152692 And I’m recruiting a PhD student! Several opportunities to join our amazing dept ✨

Just now finding out voxel is a portmanteau from volumetric pixel...what else have I missed?!

1/6 I usually don’t comment on these things, but Rylan Schaeffer et al.'s paper contains enough misconceptions that I thought it might be useful to address them. In short, effective dimensionality is not the whole story for model-brain linear regression, for several reasons:

Ev Fedorenko's Keynote at COLM. youtube.com/watch?v=8xS7tj… This talk is quite accessible for computer scientists interested in cognitive and neuro questions. Also touches on many of the shared themes of the two areas.

Working on a figure and google searched "MLP images" for some inspo...

Graduate training opportunity! See thread... The Center for Research and Education in Navigation (CRaNE) is seeking a graduate student in our Cognition & Brain Sciences (CBS) Ph.D. Program in the School of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology.

🚀At NeurIPS Conference tomorrow? Don't miss Nikolas McNeal and Mainak Deb 's poster at the UniReps workshop on the adversarial sensitivity of vision encoding models of fMRI responses! A brief teaser about what they find.

🧩 Why do task vectors exist in pretrained LLMs? Our new research uncovers how transformers form internal abstractions and the mechanisms behind in-context learning(ICL).

Honored that a piece I wrote made it to NYTimes. It's about how my mom's stroke changed my relationship to time, science, and nature. What a privilege to honor my mom in Modern Love. Below is a gift link. Let me know your thoughts🙏🏼 nytimes.com/2024/12/20/sty…