Excited to share our new paper in Cerebral Cortex (w/ Ellen Lau)! In this MEG study on visual working memory (VWM), we showed that uni- and multi-variate signals complementarily track different aspects of VWM representations across different regions. academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

Complementary univariate and multivariate signals in the parietal cortex for visual working memory pointers and features

Abstract. An emerging body of work in visual working memory (VWM) has embraced the theoretical construct of pointers: an object is mentally represented by

academic.oup.com

1/4 Thrilled to launch this space with our latest preprint on the developmental trajectory of Broca's area in the human brain doi.org/10.64898/202...

🧠🧵 New paper accepted at @jocn.bsky.social! Led by @amyqixx.bsky.social We found that memory traces carry an "echo" of how they were last accessed: the way you retrieve a concept leaves a measurable signature in the brain the next time you recognize it. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN... 1/9

Memory Traces Reflect How They Were Last Accessed

Abstract. Episodic memories are known to change with each act of retrieval. We hypothesize that accessing semantic knowledge in different ways during episodic retrieval—from unique perceptual features...

doi.org

Does anyone know if there are good published numbers on (American) English verb biases for alternating ditransitives? I.e. “give” is DO 8/10 times vs “toss” is PO 9/10 times. Either experimental norms or corpus derived

New paper in #ScienceAdvances! 10 ECoG patients performed 3 language production tasks: word, word list, and sentence production. We found surprising dissociations between how active cortical sites were and whether they encoded linguistic information: 🧵 [1/9] doi.org/10.1126/scia... @science.org

Hybrid spatial organization and evidence for magnitude-independent neural coding of linguistic information during sentence production

Brain recordings during speech reveal complex linguistic information throughout cortex, independent of neural activity levels.

doi.org

A privilege & a pleasure to co-lead the 6th run of our “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” course at the beautiful @cshlbanbury.bsky.social campus. Huge thanks to inspirational speakers, our fab TAs, talented early career researchers who joined as participants, & all who helped make it so special.

Excited to share a preprint of work done in collaboration with @emilynguist.bsky.social ! osf.io/preprints/ps... TLDR: some effect sizes are larger in lab than on web-based platforms. So when evaluating quantitative predictions, considering the testing platform can be important! 1/n

Quantifiers could be associated with different algorithms/hyperintensions from person to person, even if they all agree on truth conditions. Are they, in fact, variant in that way? We find evidence for “no! Everyone represents them the same!” Preprint here: ssrn.com/abstract=719...

I’ll be on Long Island next week at the CSHL summer course on the genetics and neurobiology of language, if you see me there say hi!

What’s the sociolinguistics of the pronunciation of “pecan”? Even within Texas it seems like it’s in crazy variation across people, regions, and phrases

One fact I’ve seen no one appreciate about World Cup commentating is that even the North American English speaking commentators use British style collective plural agreement. “England are regrouping” etc

Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8

Excited to share our (w/ @smancha.bsky.social ) latest work, where we offered some EEG evidence suggesting that morphology and syntax might not be that different in language comprehension, capitalizing on some interesting properties of Mandarin Chinese. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Shared Neural Computations for Syntactic and Morphological Structures: Evidence From Mandarin Chinese

Although psycho-/neuro-linguistics has assumed a distinction between morphological and syntactic structure building as in traditional theoretical linguistics, this distinction has been increasingly c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Are there numbers out there on the sales of strawberry donuts with sprinkles before and after the popularization of the simpsons

I should get paid to translate back and forth between classic symbolicist cog sci and Bayesian cog sci. “Agents infer latent causes with evidence from the sensory stream” = people guess what’s going on using abstract representations

This is likely predictable since it’s kinda my niche now, but I find it genuinely shocking that psycholinguists mostly gave up on studying sentence recall and recognition circa 1990 when there were and still are 10000 open questions

We wrote a thing -- showing you don't need LLMs to model language production dynamics like the tendency for speakers to reduce predictable words. All you have to do is better model how speech rate varies depending on where a word is and how long the utterance is. arxiv.org/abs/2512.23659

Less is more: Probabilistic reduction is best explained by small-scale predictability measures

The primary research questions of this paper center on defining the amount of context that is necessary and/or appropriate when investigating the relationship between language model probabilities and ...

arxiv.org

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Half of my wife’s family speaks a Yue language that makes frequent use of the ɬ phoneme, my current obsession

Almost done grading for the course I (designed! and) taught this semester on connections between verbal working memory, sentence memory, and sentence production. I always thought it was just a cheesy thing to say, but you really do learn more from the students than you teach them

If anyone is around for SNL down the block from me, I have a sandbox poster on Sunday! I present some very preliminary data examining cued sentence recall with MEG. If you care about sentence recall, MEG sentence production, or combining psycholing with memory tasks, stop by poster E19!

Lau, E. (2025). How single-neuron computation matters for cognitive neuroscience. JoCN Forum. jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/vhhe4nh9

How single-neuron computation matters for cognitive neuroscience

jocnf.pubpub.org

I’ll be presenting a poster at HSP 2025 in about a week. It’s on memory for pronominal clitic placement in Spanish, come stop by and say hi if you can!

It’s so funny when someone does incredibly fancy bayesian cognitive modeling and then their data analysis is just like a frequentist ANOVA lol

Type logical grammars? I guess I can try

Trying to explain the concept of casseroles to my girlfriend and she has immediately stumped me by asking if lasagna is a casserole

Coming up with ever more fucked up theories of syntax phonology semantics to believe, like Tree Adjoining Grammar, Harmonic Serialism, Usage Based Cognitive Semantics

I thought of a really annoying generativist thing to say when someone asks you about doing cross-linguistic studies: well, if you take I-language seriously then nearly every study is “cross-linguistic”

Taking a syntactic formalisms class and I gotta say while MCFGs are cool they also produce some of the ugliest trees out there