Apr 25, 2023 - 4:00 pm Venue:  Singleton Auditorium (46-3002) Address:  43 Vassar St. Cambridge, MA 02139 Speaker/s:  Leila Wehbe, Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract: Aligning neural network representations with brain activity measurements is a promising approach for studying the brain. However, it is not always clear what the ability to predict brain activity from neural network representations entails. In this talk, I will describe a line of work that utilizes computational controls (control procedures used after data collection) and other procedures to understand how the brain constructs complex meaning. I will describe experiments aimed at studying the representation of the composed meaning of words during language processing, and the representation of high-level visual semantics during visual scene understanding. These experiments shed new light on meaning representation in language and vision. 

Bio: Leila Wehbe is an assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department and the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work is at the interface of cognitive neuroscience and computer science. It combines naturalistic functional imaging with machine learning both to improve our understanding of the brain and to find insight for building better artificial systems. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, working with Jack Gallant. She obtained her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked with Tom Mitchell.

This will be an in-person only event.

Organizer:  Hector Penagos Organizer Email:  cbmm-contact@mit.edu

Apr 11, 2023 - 4:00 pm Venue:  Singleton Auditorium (46-3002) Address:  43 Vassar St. Cambridge, MA 02139 Speaker/s:  Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard University

Abstract: More than two decades after her death, Eleanor Gibson still may be the best experimental psychologist ever to work in the developmental cognitive sciences, yet her work appears to have been forgotten, or never learned, by many students and investigators today.  Here, drawing on three of Gibson’s autobiographies, together with her published research and a few personal recollections, I aim to paint a portrait of her life and science.  What’s it like to be a gifted and knowledgeable scientist, working in a world that systematically excludes people like oneself, both institutionally and socially?  What institutional actions support such people, both for their benefit and for the benefit of science and its institutions?  In this talk, I focus primarily on Gibson’s thinking and research, but her life and science suggest some answers to these questions and some optimism for the future of our fields.

Bio: Elizabeth Spelke is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and an investigator at the NSF-MIT Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. Her laboratory focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, including capacities for formal mathematics, for constructing and using symbols, and for developing comprehensive taxonomies of objects. She probes the sources of these capacities primarily through behavioral research on human infants and preschool children, focusing on the origins and development of their understanding of objects, actions, people, places, number, and geometry. In collaboration with computational cognitive scientists, she aims to test computational models of infants’ cognitive capacities. In collaboration with economists, she has begun to take her research from the laboratory to the field, where randomized controlled experiments can serve to evaluate interventions, guided by research in cognitive science, that seek to enhance young children’s learning.

This will be an in-person only event.

Organizer:  Hector Penagos Organizer Email:  cbmm-contact@mit.edu