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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · May 22

Congratulations, Ko! So well deserved

Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · May 14

Humans are sensitive to many different types of social interactions, but it has been difficult to isolate these differences in the human brain

In this new preprint @yuanfangzhao.bsky.social w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social applied data-driven methods to two fMRI video datasets to address this

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Yuanfang Zhao @yuanfangzhao.bsky.social · May 14

New preprint out!

“Separate Neural Representations for Physical and Communicative Social Interactions: Evidence from Data-driven Voxel Decomposition” w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social @lisik.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Emily Finn @esfinn.bsky.social · May 5

Alternative title: "LLMs don't have ears (or eyes)"

What do humans and machines miss out on when processing language as purely written text, without all the embodied audiovisual richness that scaffolds language in daily human contexts?

Very proud of this elegant work from @tommybotch.bsky.social

Tommy Botch @tommybotch.bsky.social · May 5

New preprint! Thrilled to share my latest work with @esfinn.bsky.social -- "Sensory context as a universal principle of language in humans and LLMs"

osf.io/preprints/ps...

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osf.io

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Stacey D. Smith @iochromaland.bsky.social · May 5

On Friday, my son stayed home from school because he had a sore throat and wasn’t feeling well. He went with my husband to his office for the morning while I handled our daughter. When he came back at lunch, he was not interested in eating, saying his throat hurt too much. 1/n

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Vlad Chituc @vladchituc.bsky.social · Apr 23

I'm incredibly honored to be a recipient of this year's Glushko Prize. I've looked up to so many past winners over the years, so it's surreal to be getting one myself. Thanks to Bob Glushko and the prize committee, as well as to my advisor Brian Scholl and Sam McDougle for their letters of support.

Cognitive Science Society @cogscisociety.bsky.social · Apr 22

Join us in congratulating the rising stars of #CogSci 🌟

We're excited to introduce the 2025 Glushko Prize winners, and the fascinating research behind their work!

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Glushko Prize for outstanding dissertation in Cognitive Science.

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

In closing, I want to thank my amazing advisors for supervising this work. I could not have imagined a better place to earn my PhD than the Department of Cognitive Science at @jhuartssciences.bsky.social

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

Taken together, our results do support a spatiotemporal hierarchy for computing social interactions in the lateral visual stream.

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

In our joint regression procedure we find that communicative interactions predict STS activity within 200 ms of stimulus onset. This reveals a rapid representation of high-level social interaction features in the brain.

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

In the joint regression, we find that social primitives are broadly represented in mid- and high-level regions of the STS with a similar latency. Combined with the finding that LOC and aSTS are predicted with similar latency, this suggests there may be skip connections between EVC and the STS.

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

In our final analysis, we use our novel regression procedure to jointly predict fMRI responses using EEG and stimulus features. We find that low-level visual features predict EVC activity with a short temporal latency and that communication is represented in the STS with the longest latency.

Joint prediction of three ROIs of the brain (EVC, LOC, and aSTS) by EEG and stimulus features (AlexNet, agent distance, and communication)

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

The EEG signal predicts early visual cortex (EVC) with a very short latency. However, mid-level and high-level regions in the lateral visual pathway are represented with a similar latency, suggesting that the lateral visual stream may not be organized in a strict feedforward hierarchy.

A) The time course of EEG prediction of three ROIs in the brain: EVC, LOC, and aSTS.
B) The whole brain prediction of fMRI activity from the EEG signal over time.

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

We find that visual social primitives, such as how far apart two people are in a video, are decodable from EEG earlier than social interactions features like whether two people are communicating.

The decoding time course of two stimulus features (agent distance and communication) from the EEG activity.

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

I am excited to share our recent preprint and the last paper of my PhD! Here, @imelizabeth.bsky.social, @lisik.bsky.social, Mick Bonner, and I investigate the spatiotemporal hierarchy of social interactions in the lateral visual stream using EEG-fMRI.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

#CogSci #EEG

Shown is an example image that participants viewed either in EEG, fMRI, and a behavioral annotation task. There is also a schematic of a regression procedure for jointly predicting fMRI responses from stimulus features and EEG activity.

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Francesco Poli @francescopoli.bsky.social · Apr 23

I still can't believe this! I'm deeply grateful to Bob Glushko and to @cogscisociety.bsky.social for this award. Huge thanks to my advisors @sabinehunnius.bsky.social and @neuroecologylab.bsky.social, and to many more collaborators, all the work in my thesis would have been impossible without them!

Cognitive Science Society @cogscisociety.bsky.social · Apr 22

Join us in congratulating the rising stars of #CogSci 🌟

We're excited to introduce the 2025 Glushko Prize winners, and the fascinating research behind their work!

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Apr 23

It is truly an honor to be recognized as a Glushko prize winner among all these incredible scientists. Thank you to the prize committee and to my PhD advisors @lisik.bsky.social and Mick Bonner.

Cognitive Science Society @cogscisociety.bsky.social · Apr 22

Join us in congratulating the rising stars of #CogSci 🌟

We're excited to introduce the 2025 Glushko Prize winners, and the fascinating research behind their work!

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Colton Casto @coltoncasto.bsky.social · Apr 21

New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network**

with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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The cerebellar components of the human language network

The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · Apr 13

Hey, just a quiet reminder: it’s not true that people get more conservative as they age. *Populations* get more conservative as they age because poor and marginalized people die sooner.

nymag.com/intelligence...

Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Die Off

Sometimes older voters aren’t just naturally more conservative. It’s just that wealthier and whiter people tend to live longer and healthier lives.

nymag.com

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · Mar 14

New preprint “Monkey See, Model Knew: LLMs accurately predict visual responses in humans AND NHPs”
Led by Colin Conwell with @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social Akshay Jagadeesh, Kasper Vinken @amrahs-inolas.bsky.social @jacob-prince.bsky.social George Alvarez @taliakonkle.bsky.social & Marge Livingstone 1/n

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · Dec 18

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Martin Hebart @martinhebart.bsky.social · Dec 11

I promised to write about my thoughts on the status of the field of neuroAI, some of the big challenges we are facing, and the approaches we are taking to address them. This is super selective on the topic of finding a good model but in my view it affects the field as a whole. Here we go. 🧵

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · Dec 13

Monkey See, Model Knew: LLMs accurately Predict Human AND Macaque Visual Brain Activity
Colin Conwell, @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social, Akshay Vivek Jagadeesh, Kasper Vinken, @amrahs-inolas.bsky.social, @jacob-prince.bsky.social, George Alvarez, @taliakonkle.bsky.social and Marge Livingstone

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Emalie McMahon @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social · Jun 27

Woo! So excited to read it!

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Kohitij Kar @kohitij.bsky.social · Dec 12

This new article perfectly concludes my time & lessons in Jim’s lab.@JamesJDiCarlo and I propose +review SMART models of object recognition
✅ Sensory computable
✅ Mechanistic
✅ Anatomically Referenced
✅ Testable
Coming in Annual Reviews 2024
Preprint: bit.ly/3tk7u8D

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz @laurasn.bsky.social · Dec 12

First post here - sharing that our paper on infants' representation of third-party helping interactions is now published (OA) at the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology! www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10....

A dog puppet and a lion puppet lifting the lid of a transparent box which contains a toy rattle

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Reposted by Emalie McMahon

Elizabeth Jiwon Im @imelizabeth.bsky.social · Nov 30

I am super excited to share our preprint "Early neural development of social perception: evidence from voxel-wise encoding in young children and adults" with Angira Shirahatti and @lisik.bsky.social !! osf.io/preprints/ps...

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