Taylor Webb

LLMs have shown impressive performance in some reasoning tasks, but what internal mechanisms do they use to solve these tasks? In a new preprint, we find evidence that abstract reasoning in LLMs depends on an emergent form of symbol processing arxiv.org/abs/2502.20332 (1/N)

What dimensions organize how we see social interactions? We learn them from 53,000+ human judgments of naturalistic social clips. They explain 2× the variance of pre-labeled annotations & better predict visual cortex, EBA, and pSTS New preprint w @lisik.bsky.social 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

If you've noticed a distinct dialect emerging in frontier AI models and struggled to understand what they're talking about, you're not crazy! We turned to psycholinguistics to investigate what makes the writing style so weird, and why this might be happening 🚨New preprint! 🧵

Our paper showing privileged representational axes in brains and ANNS, by the amazing @meenakshikhosla.bsky.social, w/ @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social and @itsneuronal.bsky.social, is finally out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Meenakshi's tweet thread here: x.com/meenakshik93... and in this thread....

My main concern here is that what counts as “intelligence” is radically broad, covering “…doing, or performing functions” Any capacity measurable by cog sci is thereby written off, however closely it instantiates properties associated with human consciousness AI consciousness is ruled out by fiat

I'm looking for a PhD student in my lab. Mila is one of the best academic AI research institutions with a strong neuroAI community. Please apply to if you are interested!

I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle! We study how the brain perceives, remembers, and predicts naturalistic experiences like movies and games, using computational tools to analyze behavioral and neural data 🧠 App deadline is 12/2/26 - see our lab pubs on our website www.dpmlab.org/pubs.html

Pleased to share my new preprint with @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social and Torsten Dau: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... ! It shows that many of the characteristic limits of human hearing emerge from perceptual representations optimized for everyday hearing behavior. [1/6]

New work by @msaddler.bsky.social with a striking finding: a wide range of human perceptual thresholds are replicated in a neural network optimized for real-world auditory tasks. Suggests that thresholds are determined by linear separability in task-optimized representations.

Excited to be launching our new PhD program in Minds and Machines at UCL with co-Directors Tali Sharot and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social To apply, find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... Our launch event is on Nov 10th, with a cracking lineup of speakers: luma.com/cikzcth0

Excited to see this work published! We find that the brain codes semantic relationships similar to contextual LLMs (like GPT2) but unlike LLMs, uses contrastive coding to prevent confusion of highly similar words. Many thanks to the reviewers and BCM neurosurgery team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am recruiting graduate students for UCI's PhD in Cognitive Sciences - www.cogsci.uci.edu/graduate/pro... The lab's focus is on how relational structure and combinatorial reasoning is implemented in human brains and large language models--and if they are similar.

New paper 🍼📄 ManyBabies 3 is out (open access, registered report in Developmental Science). 30 labs, 33 languages, 839 infants set out to replicate a textbook finding: 7-month-olds learn abstract rules from speech (@garymarcus.bsky.social et al., 1999). We didn’t find it. 🧵

New paper at babylm.github.io on "Relational Attention for Data-Efficient Language Modeling" with @ecekt.bsky.social and Jakub Dotlačil, building on the seminal work of @taylorwwebb.bsky.social , @awni.bsky.social and others. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2609.20530. Code: github.com/abrsvn/babyl...

Do non-human primates have theory of mind? My new paper takes a new computational approach to this classic question. We implemented verbal theories of primates' mental representations as computational models. These models completed classic visual perspective-taking tasks.

Our paper “Confidence is detection-like in high-dimensional spaces” is now published in Open Mind, led by @wiktoriakozyra.bsky.social and @kevingoneill.github.io direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

We're hiring! PNI is recruiting an assistant professor of neuroscience working with non-human primates in any area. Review begins Oct 19: apply.interfolio.com/192521 #NeuroJobs #Neuroskyence

🤖🧠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

Our task-switching paper is now out at Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol... We find that that our brains reset to a task-neutral state between trials, providing flexibility when the upcoming task is uncertain. RNNs also learn this strategy, but only when trained to switch tasks.

We are hiring a full professor for "Intelligence in biological and artificial systems". If you don't know about the German system yet, let me tell you a little bit about working as a professor at the institute. Thread 👇

We’re recruiting a full-time lab manager to join the Shared Minds Lab at USC! This will be a great opportunity for someone who wants to get hands-on experience with research before starting a PhD program in psychology or neuroscience. More below:

The journal version is out! www.cell.com/trends-open/... AI is turning machine consciousness into a societal issue. Biological Naturalism (BN), the idea that only biological systems can be conscious, is gaining traction. We argue: either BN is untestable, or it is compatible with functionalism.

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has a new preprint with important results on a famous psychophysical law (Weber's law). It isn't, in fact, a law, because it can be broken. A more fundamental principle (efficient coding) shows when and why Weber's law holds true. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New position piece w/ @tylerbonnen.bsky.social out now in COBS! We suggest that data augmentation is a useful framework for understanding hippocampal contributions to generalization, and offers a path towards more precise modeling: 1/

Very much looking forward to welcoming a new colleague! We're hiring at both ranks — the senior (Associate/Full) search is open too, applications due Oct 15: apply.interfolio.com/190696

We're recruiting postdoc fellows in computational neuroscience for Brown's NIH T32 Training Program — brain & cognitive modeling from biophysics to AI, with connections to mental health & psychiatry. US citizens/PRs. Review begins Sept 1. @carneyinstitute @browncopsy apply.interfolio.com/190111

New paper from the BCM Neurosurgery research team! "Neural basis of compositional control" led by @assiachericoni.bsky.social and @justfineneuro.bsky.social ! 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Naturalistic Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab is launching at UT Austin and is looking for founding members at all levels, including lab manager, PhD students, and postdocs! #NeuroJobs We will study human brain🧠 and memory & attention, using fMRI and modeling. thesonglab.github.io

What role does Emergence play in Neural Networks? We find that learning emergent low-dimensional representations is key for out-of-distribution generalisation. New Preprint out with @neural-reckoning.org arxiv.org/abs/2607.10430

Then @jonkoenig.bsky.social will present a spotlight poster in the afternoon session ‘Trading Generalization for Working Memory Capacity in Neural Network Representations’ 2026.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=p...

Happening today at #CCN @melodylizx.bsky.social will give a talk + spotlight poster ‘Data diversity drives the emergence of symbolic mechanisms in LLMs’ in the morning session 2026.ccneuro.org/contributed-...

Very excited to be involved with this much needed effort as a senior editor, a new journal focused on natural and artificial minds, please submit your work!

Happening this morning at #CCN poster session C, @zahmb.bsky.social will present ‘Mechanisms of Emergent Analogical Mapping’ 2026.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=p... please check it out if you’re at CCN!

I'll be at CCN next week. Please get in touch if you want to chat about these positions.

I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!

So thrilled to be joining the Psychology Department at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social as an assistant prof next summer! I'll be recruiting for PhD/postdoc to start in Autumn 2027, so if you're interested in using computational approaches to studying human cognition please get in touch!

I am *thrilled* to share this review in @currentbiology.bsky.social out today, by yours truly, @myoo.bsky.social, @michalk.bsky.social, Taro Toyoizumi, @tyrellturing.bsky.social, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social, & @hakwan.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵👇

New preprint from the lab! “A number simplex in the human medial temporal lobe” led by @hanlin-zhu.bsky.social 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...