Ev Fedorenko

UT Linguistics'll have 4 (!) computational linguists! Consider applying! I'm looking for students and also potentially postdocs. For postdocs, particularly interested in philosophically rich issues around AI cognition: Can AI introspect? How can we study if they have preferences?

👶🧠 Pequay, E., & Dautriche, I. (2026). The development of compositionality in language and thought. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 8. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Update: we’re living in Paris this year! 🇫🇷 I’m here as a Fulbright Scholar, doing research and finishing The Bilingual Bubble—the book about everything I got wrong raising my daughter bilingually, as a linguist and SLP who really should have known better 😂 Check it out: instagram.com/thebilingual...

Thanks so much for the fun conversation @wiair.bsky.social ! A pleasure to chat about language, LLMs, and memory--covering some work with @bkhmsi.bsky.social @mschrimpf.bsky.social @michael-lepori.bsky.social @klemenkotar.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @thomashikaru.bsky.social, among others!

1/ How do we sustain mental continuity in the face of interruption? @xianl-explorer.bsky.social found that, while people listen to a story, posterior medial cortex expresses a slowly evolving "background" representation of the story's context, which survived through silence and interfering tasks.

If you're interested in the discussions around the merits of NeuroAI for understanding the mind & brain, check out our #CCN2026 GAC Debate recording! www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYES...

New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:

The psychology job market may be showing some early signs of regaining strength, relative to last year. A week ago last year, fewer than 200 jobs had been listed - today, it is nearly 300, a figure we didn't hit till early October in '25. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

CMU is hiring an Assistant Professor in NeuroAI! Come join our awesome NeuroAI community 🧠🤖: apply.interfolio.com/189268

Are you studying human neuroscience broadly defined, and enjoy working with bright and motivated students? If so we'd love to see your application for this TT position at Pomona College! Review of applications begins on Oct 1.

Great news! Some of us have been waiting a long time for major funders to not just shovel $ into the maws of the big publishers, and instead support the long tail of scholar-controlled journals that are run on a shoestring

Heads-up: Doris Tsao is hiring 15 scientists/engineers to work on the neuroscience of consciousness at her new venture (Astera). astera.org/careers/#box...

We are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position, with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. Please apply or forward to anyone who might be interested! facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...

Come be my colleague!! 🎉 We’re hiring an Assistant Professor in Developmental Biology at UCSD! If you’re doing exciting work in development or regeneration, come join us!! Please spread the word and apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04591

If this makes you mad, submit your cognitive science research to @openmindjournal.bsky.social No APCs, no subscription fees. It's funded by university libraries, at low cost.

Speech production is fast, complicated, cool (when the right thing is said...) Covert speech is a nice trick to study this. If you like speech planning, forward models, efference copies, brains this work is (we hope) helpful to clarify the brain mechs. #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Wonderful work by @andreadevarda.bsky.social linking behavioral and neural manifestations of language comprehension using language models. With @rplevy.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social

🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖 (The result of an 8-year project!) LLMs seem very different from symbolic systems. Yet LLMs excel in symbolic domains (e.g., language/code/math). How do they do it? Our finding: LLM representations have implicit symbolic structure! Link in thread ⬇️ 1/n

New preprint! 🧠👀🤖 Behavioral and brain responses to language reflect different levels of linguistic representation w/ @whylikethis.bsky.social , @evfedorenko.bsky.social , and @rplevy.bsky.social (1/10)

Go, @andreadevarda.bsky.social! A beautiful and comprehensive study! 🔑 findng: behav. measures are ~fully reducible to simple predictors of processing effort (surprisal, word length+frequency), but for 🧠 measures, LLM embeddings carry additional predictive power, likely capturing aspects of meaning.

Full consideration for our fulltime Lab Coordinator position guaranteed for applications received by Fri Aug 28! Please apply, and share.

New paper! @samiyousif.bsky.social and I opine on Cognitive Maps as a Medium for Thought....now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social We discuss what cog maps are and how they might interact with a Language of Thought. This was a fun one, spanning philosophy, cog sci, and rodent neurophysiology!

Excited to share our new preprint on how the cerebellum specializes for language even in the absence of contralateral neocortical inputs, with @aniladmello.bsky.social and our collaborators @evfedorenko.bsky.social, @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

🚨Job Search announcement 🚨 @psychillinois.bsky.social is searching for an assistant prof in cognitive neuroscience. Come join us! Pls RT 🙏 Full ad: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #neuroimaging

📣 New study out today! We show that the brain's language network stays remarkably stable with age — same topography, lateralization, selectivity and connectivity as in younger adults — while the domain-general multiple demand network showed altered activity patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@salonisameernaik.bsky.social did a fantastic job leading this—impressive since she isn't even in grad school yet (applying this fall!). Super fun to collab w/ @tylermarghetis.bsky.social on the role of perceptual processes in seemingly abstract math reasoning. See thread & preprint for details!👇

Videos of amazing workshop "Toward AI with Human Level Efficiency" organized by Ilker Yildirim et al. ... cnclgithub.github.io/yale-ai-work... with T. Brooke-Wilson, @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @lisik.bsky.social, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, @toddgureckis.bsky.social, McCoy, Lew, and Kaelbling.

Join us in Barcelona for a postdoc! We are looking for candidates with a strong NLP/ML/AI background and an interest in linguistic diversity and human and machine cognition: dub.sh/blasi_nlp_po...

Can't wait for this conference! Register now! iccg14.oa-event.com

Deadline 8 July: 2 tenure track professorships in communication acoustics (human and machine learning), Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory, TU Graz jobs.tugraz.at/en/jobs/855c...

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ruimin Gao, Anna A. Ivanova, et al: The language network responds robustly to sentences across tasks doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Now out in @natcomms.nature.com w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social: across many people (>1k) and tasks (>300), the the brain's language network reliably shows up in the functional connectome (correlated activity in fMRI). 1/

100% on this! Inspired by this piece in 2014 (www.nature.com/articles/nrn...; @clydefrancks.bsky.social @profsimonfisher.bsky.social), we've stopped excluding left handers about a decade ago and have never looked back. :)

In honor of International Left-Handers Day, we have an updated preprint on scanning left-handed participants in fMRI studies. Although they're 11% of the population, we routinely screen LH people out of fMRI studies due to concerns about functional lateralization 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Many of you will have seen the recent post about changes at OSF. If you'd like to learn more about how to use other services (particularly Zenodo) to share data and code, see my book chapter on resource sharing. bettercode-book.org/book-sharing...

What a joy to visit today with the wonderful Molly Potter, to whom I owe my career. Molly's ideas still motivate much of my research and her example of what it means to be a mentor, scientist, and activist continue to inspire. Yay Molly!

Our #CogSci2026 paper on **self-reported variations in inner language** got the Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award (philosophy + cogsci!) Paper: escholarship.org/uc/item/1qr6... +a journal-length preprint coming soon By Raquel Krempel, Jin Li @ruimingao.bsky.social @ruifengyu.bsky.social

Confused about all this talk of compositionality in neuroscience? Read our new perspective www.nature.com/articles/s41... with authors Reidar Riveland and Alex Pouget.