Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 2: The relationship between language and thought

Guests: 

• Evelina Fedorenko, Associate Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT
• Steve Piantadosi, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Head of Computation and Language Lab, UC Berkeley
• Gary Lupyan, Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell

Producer: Katherine Moncure

Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano

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More info:

• Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine Learning
• Lecture: Artificial Intelligence
• SFI programs: Education

Books: 

• Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell
• Developing Object Concepts in Infancy: An Associative Learning Perspective by Rakison, D.H., and G. Lupyan
• Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky
• On Language by Noam Chomsky

Talks: 

• The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell
• The language system in the human brain: Parallels & Differences with LLMs by Evelina Federenko
   

Papers & Articles:

• “Dissociating language and thought in large language models,” in Trends in Cognitive Science (March 19, 2024), doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.01.011
• “The language network as a natural kind within the broader landscape of the human brain,” in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (April 12, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/s41583-024-00802-4
• “Visual grounding helps learn word meanings in low-data regimes,” in arXiv (v2 revised on 25 March 2024), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.13257
• “No evidence of theory of mind reasoning in the human language network,” in Cerebral Cortex (December 28, 2022), doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac505
• “Chapter 1: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language,” by Steve T. Piantadosi (v7, November 2023), lingbuzz/007180
• “Uniquely human intelligence arose from expanded information capacity,” in Nature Reviews Psychology (April 2, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00283-3
• “Understanding the allure and pitfalls of Chomsky's acience,” Review by Gary Lupyan, in The American Journal of Psychology (Spring 2018), doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.131.1.0112
• “Language is more abstract than you think, or, why aren’t languages more iconic?” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (June 18, 2018), 
• Published:18 June 2018, doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0137
• “Does vocabulary help structure the mind?” in Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology: Human Communication: Origins, Mechanisms, and Functions (February 27, 2021), doi.org/10.1002/9781119684527.ch6
• “Use of superordinate labels yields more robust and human-like visual representations in convolutional neural networks,” in Journal of Vision (December 2021), doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.13.13
• “Appeals to ‘Theory of Mind’ no longer explain much in language evolution,” by Justin Sulik and Gary Lupyan
• “Effects of language on visual perception,” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (October 1, 2020), doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.08.005
• “Is language-of-thought the best game in the town we live?” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (September 28, 2023), doi:10.1017/S0140525X23001814
• “Can we distinguish machine learning from human learning?” in arXiv (October 8, 2019), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1910.03466