Marco Ciapparelli

@marcociapparelli.bsky.social

Post-Doc, Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento. https://marcociapparelli.github.io/

Wonderful to see this! For (controversial?) context. There’s long been an argument that what brains & ANNs are doing cannot be fathomed beyond the meta like (eg) architecture, learning rules and such. And there’s a counter-idea: ”let’s try?”. When we stumbled on the correlates of memorability /1

micha heilbron@mheilbron.bsky.social · last mo.

What makes some stimuli more memorable than others? In a new paper w/ @davogelsang.bsky.social, we show that the magnitude of a stimulus's ANN representation predicts both image and word memorability Stimuli that activate more features, more strongly, leave a stronger memory trace Out now in JML⬇️

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 🧠

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz

Nature Human Behaviour - Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

rdcu.be

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...

Italian blasphemy and German ingenuity: how swear words differ around the world

Once swearwords were dismissed as a sign of low intelligence, now researchers argue the ‘power’ of taboo words has been overlooked

theguardian.com

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

The Neural Consequences of Semantic Composition

Humans can create completely new concepts through semantic composition. These ‘conceptual combinations’ can be created by attributing the features of one concept to another (e.g., a lemon flamingo mig...

biorxiv.org

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

from minicons import scorer
from nltk.tokenize import TweetTokenizer

lm = scorer.IncrementalLMScorer("gpt2")

# your own tokenizer function that returns a list of words
# given some sentence input
word_tokenizer = TweetTokenizer().tokenize

# word scoring
lm.word_score_tokenized(
    ["I was a matron in France", "I was a mat in France"], 
    bos_token=True, # needed for GPT-2/Pythia and NOT needed for others
    tokenize_function=word_tokenizer,
    bow_correction=True, # Oh and Schuler correction
    surprisal=True,
    base_two=True
)

'''
First word = -log_2 P(word | <beginning of text>)

[[('I', 6.1522440910339355),
  ('was', 4.033324718475342),
  ('a', 4.879510402679443),
  ('matron', 17.611848831176758),
  ('in', 2.5804288387298584),
  ('France', 9.036953926086426)],
 [('I', 6.1522440910339355),
  ('was', 4.033324718475342),
  ('a', 4.879510402679443),
  ('mat', 19.385351181030273),
  ('in', 6.76780366897583),
  ('France', 10.574726104736328)]]
'''