Rachel Ryskin

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...

Optimized feature gains explain and predict successes and failures of human selective listening - Nature Human Behaviour Griffith et al. show that human-like auditory attentional strategies naturally arise from the optimization of feature gains for selective listening.

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)

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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 Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in a variety of linguistic tasks. LLMs primarily combine information across words in a sentence using...

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...

title section of the paper: “Cross-Modal Taxonomic Generalization in (Vision) Language Models” by Tianyang Xu, Marcelo Sandoval-Castañeda, Karen Livescu, Greg Shakhnarovich, Kanishka Misra.

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

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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 🔊)

Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

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...

Very cool! Looking forward to reading!

Learning through prediction: a case of verb bias learning Linguistic prediction, which emerges from experience, is a pervasive process in language comprehension. However, how prediction develops as learning unfolds and how it drives the learning process r...

📣 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

GitHub - BenjaFried/modsoc_Julia: Modeling Social Behavior in Julia Modeling Social Behavior in Julia. Contribute to BenjaFried/modsoc_Julia development by creating an account on GitHub.

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...

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

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...

Abstract of the paper

Figure 1 - experimental setup

Figure 2 - accuracy over time

Figure 3 - semantic similarity within/across games

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...

How does a deep neural network look at lexical stress in English words? Despite their success in speech processing, neural networks often operate as black boxes, prompting the following questions: What informs their decisions, and h

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.

Distinct neuronal populations in the human brain combine content and context - Nature Single-neuron recordings in humans reveal largely separate content and context neurons whose coordinated activity flexibly places memory items in context.

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...

Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University

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

It was such a treat for us. Thanks for making the trip down and sharing your fascinating work!

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...
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