How do we represent maps of social relationships in the mind & brain? To find out, we tracked 1st-year university students’ friendships, as well as students’ *beliefs* about who was friends with whom in their network.
Yang breaks down what we found in the quoted thread 👇🏻
Broader context below:
Congrats!!!
Hossein was supposed to come to my lab as a grad student but couldn’t because of the travel ban. I had a blast writing this paper with him, but it was bittersweet knowing he should have been in person with us. ❤️ check out 🧵below. part of a special issue on kissing led by Deb Lieberman.
What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇
PDF available here: aliciamchen.github.io/files/chen20... (8/8)
Thanks to my co-authors Matthias Hofer (co-first), @moshepoliak.bsky.social, @rplevy.bsky.social, and @nogazs.bsky.social
Thanks also to our editor @kennysmithed.bsky.social and our anonymous reviewers for the helpful feedback! (7/8)
These results suggest that when both signals and meanings are continuous, predictable non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships may play a central role in the emergence of effective communication systems. (6/8)
Plot depicting coefficient estimates in a linear model, with bars as 95% confidence intervals. The predictors are learning score, alignment, systematicity, number of clusters, and Hopkins statistic (a discreteness metric). Systematicity and alignment are significant predictors; the others are not.
But what kind of structure actually helps people communicate better?
Only systematicity (and how well partners’ systems aligned with each other) robustly predicted communicative success. (5/8)
Qualitative assessment of the use of systematicity. (a) A one-dimensional MDS embedding of the emergent signaling systems. Each pair of lines corresponds to the two partners in a game. Each dot corresponds to a signal, and is colored by its target color. The games are sorted by their average communication score. (b) A two-dimensional MDS visualization of all emergent signals across all dyads. As in (a), each dot corresponds to a signal and is colored by its target color. Black squares correspond to the initialization signals.
We found that participants developed communication systems that displayed both discreteness (clustering of whistled signals into distinct word-like groups), and systematicity (the signals are predictably organized, in a way that corresponds to what they refer to in the world). (4/8)
Experimental setup. In the learning phase (a), participants learn five initialization signal-color pairings (signals shown are a visualization of pitch over time). In the communication phase (b), participants are assigned speaker and listener roles, and have to extrapolate their learned signals to communicate about a total of forty colors.
After learning five whistle-color pairings as "common ground," they had to generalize this common ground to communicate about 40 colors. This setup lets us look at what kinds of strategies people develop, under communicative pressure. (3/8)
We ran an interactive communication experiment where participants were paired with another partner and used alien whistle sounds — fully continuous pitch contours — to communicate about colors. (2/8)
Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories.
In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)
39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing
March 26-28, 2026
hsp2026.org
MIT, Cambridge MA, USA.
email: info@hsp2026.org
Special session: Language and thought in minds and machines
Submission deadline: December 12 2025
(Real deadline; no extension)
(1)💡NEW PUBLICATION💡
Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures
Work with Curtis Chen and Ted Gibson
Link to paper: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...
In memory of Curtis Chen.
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
New paper announcement! journals.lww.com/greenjournal...
The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology is an unusual place for me to publish… Let me tell you the story of this paper.
My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle!
We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate.
It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations.
Spread the words!
If you missed us at #cogsci2025, my lab presented 3 new studies showing how efficient (lossy) compression shapes individual learners, bilinguals, and action abstractions in language, further demonstrating the extraordinary applicability of this principle to human cognition! 🧵
1/n
🚨Out in PNAS🚨
with @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
Punishment, even when intended to teach norms and change minds for the good, may backfire.
Our computational cognitive model explains why!
Paper: tinyurl.com/yc7fs4x7
News: tinyurl.com/3h3446wu
🧵
Super excited to have the #InfoCog workshop this year at #CogSci2025! Join us in SF for an exciting lineup of speakers and panelists, and check out the workshop's website for more info and detailed scheduled
sites.google.com/view/infocog...
As always, CogSci has a fantastic lineup of workshops this year. An embarrassment of riches!
Still deciding which to pick? If you are interested in building computational models of social cognition, I hope you consider joining @maxkw.bsky.social, @dae.bsky.social, and me for a crash course on memo!
So excited our paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! Huge thanks to our editor and reviewers 🧠 Their thoughtful suggestions inspired Experiments 3 & 4, including a striking inverse correlation between idleness judgments and speed-up predictions
🎤 "Your #CogSci presentation was quite good this year."
How flattered or offended will you be? The answer may depend on whether you speak British or American English 🇺🇸🇬🇧. Our new #CogSci2025 paper reveals systematic differences in how different cultures interpret the same words.
If you’ll be at #CogSci2025, consider (or at least consider considering) attending our @cogscisociety.bsky.social workshop on meta reasoning
🤔🤨🧐
We’ll be discussing problem selection through various lenses represented by a great lineup of speakers!
Thrilled to announce our new publication titled 'Decoding predicted future states from the brain's physics engine' with @emiecz.bsky.social, Cyn X. Fang, @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/full/10....
(1/n)
If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition"
sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...
The first big talk I have given since starting my lab in 2023! 🧠 👶 💻📊Thank you @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social for the invitation and recording. Feedback welcome!
Yay!
