Hannah Small

Hannah Small

@hsmall.bsky.social

5th year PhD candidate in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins, working with Leyla Isik https://www.hannah-small.com/

127 followers164 following10 posts

Hannah Small reposted

Also if you're at #CCN2026 come chat with me about Minds, Machines, and Brains @mmb-journal.bsky.social A new journal we are launching with @mitpress.bsky.social with my co-EICs Kendrick Kay & Ellie Pavlick, and the rest of the wonderful editorial board: direct.mit.edu/mmb/pages/ed...

direct.mit.eduEditorial Information | Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT PressEditorial Information | Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press Editorial Information All inquiries should be directed to mindsmachinesandbrains@gmail.com Co-Editors in Chief Leyla Isik ...
Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

Hannah Small reposted

Hannah Small reposted

Hannah Small reposted

We are still hiring for our computational focus lab coordinator position! If you have a computational / software engineering background and are looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school, this would be a great fit. Read more about our lab here! www.vislearnlab.org

‼️

Manasi Malik@manasimalik.bsky.social

Excited to share new work on how the brain makes social inferences from visual input! 🧠👯‍♂️ (With @lisik.bsky.social , @shariliu.bsky.social, @tianminshu.bsky.social , and Minjae Kim!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hannah Small reposted

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

Hannah Small reposted

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

JHU Cognitive Science@jhucogsci.bsky.social

We are seeking candidates for two tenured/tenure-track faculty positions: One in high-level vision, written language and/or conceptual representation apply.interfolio.com/178825 One in language apply.interfolio.com/178813 Please help us spread the word!

Hannah Small reposted

View full thread

Follow-up analyses showed that both social perception and language regions were best predicted by later vision model layers that map onto both high-level social semantic signals (valence, the presence of a social interaction, faces). 7/n

View full thread

We find that vision embeddings dominate prediction across cortex. Surprisingly, even language-selective regions were well predicted by vision model embeddings, as well as or better than language model features. 5/n

Importantly, vision and language embeddings are only weakly correlated throughout the movie, suggesting that the vision and language embeddings are each predicting distinct variance in the neural responses. 6/n

View full thread

To address this, we collected fMRI data from 34 participants while they watched a 45- minute naturalistic audiovisual movie. Critically, we used functional localizer experiments to identify social interaction perception and language-selective regions in the same participants. 3/n

We densely labeled the vision and language features of the movie using a combination of human annotations and vision and language deep neural network (DNN) models and linearly mapped these features to fMRI responses using an encoding model 4/n

Humans effortlessly extract social information from both the vision and language signals around us. However, most work (even most naturalistic fMRI encoding work) is limited to studying unimodal processing. How does the brain process simultaneous multimodal social signals? 2/n

Hannah Small reposted

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n

Hannah Small reposted

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

Hannah Small reposted

Hannah Small reposted

As a result of Trump’s slashes to research funding, dozens of graduate programs have announced reductions and cancellations of graduate admissions slots. If you are an impacted applicant, please fill out this survey: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 🧪🧠🧬🔬🥼👩🏼‍🔬🧑‍🔬

docs.google.comGrad Admission Impacts SurveyIt is grad admissions season and many postbacs are feeling the chilling impacts of the Trump administration's recent executive orders freezing and slashing extramural research funding. Dozens of gradu...

Hannah Small reposted

✨i'm hiring a lab manager, with a start date of ~September 2025! to express interest, please complete this google form: forms.gle/GLyAbuD779Rz... looking for someone to join our multi-disciplinary team, using OPM, EEG, iEEG and computational techniques to study speech and language processing! 🧠

forms.gleGoogle Forms: Sign-inAccess Google Forms with a personal Google account or Google Workspace account (for business use).

If you are interested in PhD Application Mentoring for the JHU Cog Sci program, fill out the interest form here! forms.gle/aBuBLzSa4Qje...

Leyla Isik@lisik.bsky.social

Our amazing JHU Cog Sci PhD students are running a PhD application mentoring program. You can find out more and sign up here: cogsci.jhu.edu/event/phd-ap... Priority deadline is Nov 5!

Hannah Small reposted

My recent work with @lisik.bsky.social on social touch is now published on JNeuro. We show that the brain detects the social-affective significance of observed touch at an early stage, within the time frame of feedforward visual processing through social perceptual brain regions.

jneurosci.orgRapid processing of observed touch through social perceptual brain regions: an EEG-fMRI fusion studySeeing social touch triggers a strong social-affective response that involves multiple brain networks, including visual, social perceptual, and somatosensory systems. Previous studies have identified ...

You are up to date.