RT Pramod
rtpramod.bsky.social
RT Pramod
@rtpramod.bsky.social
Postdoc at MIT. Cognitive Neuroscience.
Pinned
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)
Decoding predicted future states from the brain’s “physics engine”
Using fMRI in humans, this study provides evidence for future state prediction in brain regions involved in physical reasoning.
www.science.org
Reposted by RT Pramod
𝗔 𝗡𝗘𝗨𝗥𝗢𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗫
By Mars and Passingham
"Understanding anthropoid foraging challenges may thus contribute to our understanding of human cognition"
Going to the top of the reading list!
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#neuroskyence
October 11, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
🚨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

🧵
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
tinyurl.com
August 8, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
Super excited to share our new article: “Dissociable cortical regions represent things and stuff in the human brain” with @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @rtpramod.bsky.social and @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social

Video abstract: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0XR...

Paper: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lWxv3QW8S...
Things and Stuff: How the brain distinguishes oozing fluids from solid objects
YouTube video by McGovern Institute
www.youtube.com
August 1, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵
New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social
1/8
Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language
Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...
tinyurl.com
August 3, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
Can you tell if a tower will fall or if two objects will collide — just by looking? 🧠👀 Come check out my #CogSci2025‪ poster (P1-W-207) on July 31, 13:00–14:15 PT to learn how people do general-purpose physical reasoning from visual input!
July 29, 2025 at 11:15 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
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)
Decoding predicted future states from the brain’s “physics engine”
Using fMRI in humans, this study provides evidence for future state prediction in brain regions involved in physical reasoning.
www.science.org
June 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM
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)
Decoding predicted future states from the brain’s “physics engine”
Using fMRI in humans, this study provides evidence for future state prediction in brain regions involved in physical reasoning.
www.science.org
June 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
I am excited to share our recent preprint and the last paper of my PhD! Here, @imelizabeth.bsky.social, @lisik.bsky.social, Mick Bonner, and I investigate the spatiotemporal hierarchy of social interactions in the lateral visual stream using EEG-fMRI.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

#CogSci #EEG
April 23, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
When you see this image, does it make you wonder what that baby is thinking. Do you think the baby is merely perceiving a set of shapes or do you think that the baby is also inferring meaning from the face they are looking at? (1/5)
April 22, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
**ecstatic** to share our @iclr-conf.bsky.social paper: sparse components distinguish visual pathways & their alignment to neural networks, with @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and meenakshi khosla (openreview.net/forum?id=IqH...)

1/n
Sparse components distinguish visual pathways & their alignment to...
The ventral, dorsal, and lateral streams in high-level human visual cortex are implicated in distinct functional processes. Yet, deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on a single task model the...
openreview.net
April 22, 2025 at 8:35 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
In a study now out in @eLife, @GeorginJacob @PramodRT9 and I have some exciting results: a novel computation that helps the brain solve disparate visual tasks, a novel brain region that performs this computation....what's not to like?! Read on.... 1/n
elifesciences.org/articles/93033
Visual homogeneity computations in the brain enable solving property-based visual tasks
Seemingly disparate property-based tasks (oddball search, same-different and symmetry) are solved by computing a novel image property, visual homogeneity, which is localized to the object selective co...
elifesciences.org
April 18, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
Academics - where are academic jobs posted for non-UK non-North American countries? If you were looking for jobs in, say, the Nordic countries, or Australia, where do you look? Asking for all the PhDs who are on the market this year. (Pls no April fools jokes, their nerves are frayed as it is)
April 1, 2025 at 9:15 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
I’m hiring a full-time lab tech for two years starting May/June. Strong coding skills required, ML a plus. Our research on the human brain uses fMRI, ANNs, intracranial recording, and behavior. A great stepping stone to grad school. Apply here:
careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...
......
Technical Associate I, Kanwisher Lab
MIT - Technical Associate I, Kanwisher Lab - Cambridge MA 02139
careers.peopleclick.com
March 26, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
My commentary on the do's and don'ts of cognitive evaluations in LLMs is now out in Nature Human Behavior:

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

posting here with a figure that didn't make it into the final draft and is now instead a boring table :P

#CogSci #LLMs #AI
January 16, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
Come and work with us and do a PhD with on a very exciting project #neurojobs
January 15, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Reposted by RT Pramod
My email is now closed until 2025. It’s been a tremendous year and I really could not wish for more. I got more this year than I ever dreamed off. Great collaborations (Sight team & @rtpramod.bsky.social & @nancykanwisher.bsky.social), students and researchers, cool papers, new data & funding.
a man in a sweater is dancing in front of a door with a christmas wreath .
ALT: a man in a sweater is dancing in front of a door with a christmas wreath .
media.tenor.com
December 20, 2024 at 8:27 PM
Reposted by RT Pramod
New paper with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, @rtpramod.bsky.social, @jessica__chomik, @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @evfedorenko.bsky.social on the representations that underlie our intuitive physical reasoning about the world. Thread 🧵about our new preprint 📄✨linked here: tinyurl.com/intphyslang 1/10
Intuitive physical reasoning is not mediated by linguistic nor exclusively domain-general abstract representations
The ability to reason about the physical world is a critical tool in the human cognitive toolbox, but the nature of the representations that mediate physical reasoning remains debated. Here, we use fM...
tinyurl.com
November 27, 2024 at 12:57 AM