Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...

tinyurl.com

It wouldn’t be FENS if there wasn’t some sort of clash - definitely check out awesome work by @aryabhomick.bsky.social in Friday morning’s poster session tracking learning dynamics of abstract task structure in the PFC as well as evidence for complex hierarchical learning in rodents!

Mohamady El-Gaby@melgaby.bsky.social · last mo.

If you’re still around on Friday morning I’ll be giving a talk about the latest work and ideas from our lab - alongside lots of great theory and experimental talks in the “Latent representations for smart decisions” symposium. 5/5

Same session contains this exciting new work from friends: Athena Apostolelli @sandra-neuro.bsky.social @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social and @behrenstimb.bsky.social showing PFC learning dynamics in a spontaneously emerging type of abstraction behaviour in mice

How does the human brain extract abstract structure from experience? We show that sensory-independent relational representations emerge in mPFC over several days. Work with @mgarvert.bsky.social and @behrenstimb.bsky.social now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Most models of learning ask what you can represent. We think the real bottleneck is what you can afford to find, since searching for a good representation is itself expensive. New preprint w/ @davidnagy.bsky.social, Peter Dayan & @thecharleywu.bsky.social 🧵👇

Good scientist, terrible designer? We feel you. Inspired by MetBrewer, the palette chooser for the connoisseurs, @sandra-neuro.bsky.social and I present EraBrewer: great looking colours for us Swifties! github.com/mathias-sm/E... cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 New preprint w/ Valerio Rubino and Peter Dayan: how do people discover and use compositional structure under constraints? osf.io/preprints/ps... A key factor is a simple heuristic that favors reuse of repeated and symmetric fragments across scales, is robust to time pressure, and sped up RTs 🧵👇

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

Excited to share our new paper in @pnas.org with @bnmorillon.bsky.social & @valentinwyart.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We study three core inference systems, and how their interaction shapes human learning and decision-making.

*Multi-region computations in the brain* When two regions are better than one... doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... #neuroskyence

If you have ever wondered what happens in your brain when you look at those scatterplots from your research data (hoping to find a significant correlation!)... check our paper out !

MIT Press@mitpress.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New and #OpenAccess in the January issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: The Neural Bases of Graphical Perception: A Novel Instance of Cultural Recycling? by @lorenzo-ciccione.bsky.social and Stanislas Dehaene: direct.mit.edu/jocn/article... @jocn.bsky.social @standehaene.bsky.social

At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106... Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!

Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social! elifesciences.org/articles/106... We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.

Thread of French and Dutch research institutes slowly unsubscribing from web of science (and thence impact factors).

1/ Excited to share that our symposium review covering cognitive mapping in the PFC just came out in the Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for our ability to rapidly and flexibly adapt our behavior in new environments based on our previous experience. Despite its importance, the neural substrates a...

jneurosci.org

Will you be at #SfN25? Stop by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre’s posters and talks! @sfn.org

Come join us at #SfN25 for the minisymposium "Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex"! Saturday, Nov 15, 2:00-4:30pm, Room SDCC 6CF www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/21171... We will explore how the PFC represents structured relationships across species and how this supports flexible behavior.

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The heartbreaking thing about this is that there’s already a proven way to invest lots of money in a knowledge machine that produces unforeseeable results that include fantastically profitable ideas (and some life-saving ones) and generally benefit society and this machine is called a university

Warren Terra@warrenterra.bsky.social · last yr.

From the replies (bsky.app/profile/dasb...) here's Sam Altman doing what the quoted post described. He seems serious about it.

Confidence in absence as confidence in counterfactual visibility: a CogSci proceedings paper with star MSc student Maya Schipper, is now out on PsyArXiv: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵👇

Anyone with a WSJ subscription & app can check whether that summary appears in anything actually written by WSJ? Somehow I would find it even more fitting/absurd if this was an AI-powered notification summary. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat...

Melanie Mitchell@melaniemitchell.bsky.social · last yr.

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

New survey of 802 experimental/behavioral economists finds: (a) most support preserving anonymity for referees (b) most are open to publishing anonymized referee reports Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me... By @danieljevans.bsky.social, @adam-gill.bsky.social, et al.

It was really great to meet and work with @maxencepajot.bsky.social as he was trailblazing this—congrats!! 👏 Takeaways: you can predict number frequencies in books by thinking of numbers as programs, testing mental representation ideas from doi.org/10.1016/j.ti... See Maxence's great thread below👇

Maxence Pajot@maxencepajot.bsky.social · last yr.

Some numbers seem to show up everywhere. Think of 10, 12, 24, 36... Others—like 26 or 34—don’t get the same attention.Why? In our new paper with @standehaene.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, we argue it's because of how the mind builds number concepts. 🧵 doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Some numbers seem to show up everywhere. Think of 10, 12, 24, 36... Others—like 26 or 34—don’t get the same attention.Why? In our new paper with @standehaene.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, we argue it's because of how the mind builds number concepts. 🧵 doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Retour d'une vieille rengaine: étouffer le palais de la découverte pour justifier son unification avec la cité des sciences et de l'industrie. Curiosité scientifique ≠ fascination technologique; ces institutions ont des rôles très distincts! Signalez votre soutien www.change.org/p/sauvons-le...

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Pr. Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh explaining "How Can Large Language Models Become More Human?" to a captivated audience. #pint25 has started; it's great fun to see it come together! Join our "Beautiful Mind" theme at The George IV in Chiswick, or any other fascinating topics featured in pintofscience.co.uk

Online Now: Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?

Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?

Concepts of exact number are often thought to originate from counting and the successor function, or from a refinement of the approximate number system (ANS). We argue here for a third origin: a shared language-of-thought (LoT) for geometry and arithmetic that involves primitives of repetition, concatenation, and recursive embedding. Applied to sets, those primitives engender concepts of exact integers through recursive applications of additions and multiplications. Links between geometry and arithmetic also explain the emergence of higher-level notions (squares, primes, etc.). Under our hypothesis, understanding a number means having one or several mental expressions for it, and their minimal description length (MDL) determines how easily they can be mentally manipulated. Several historical, developmental, linguistic, and brain imaging phenomena provide preliminary support for our proposal.

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We're bringing together leading researchers from top institutions worldwide to Split, Croatia this summer. If you're passionate about brain-inspired AI, computational neuroscience, or fundamental mathematical principles driving intelligence, this conference is the place to be!

It's #InternationalWomensDay and apparently feminist slogans from 50 years ago are relevant again.