BI 171 Mike Frank: Early Language and Cognition
07/22/23 • 84 min
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My guest is Michael C. Frank, better known as Mike Frank, who runs the Language and Cognition lab at Stanford. Mike's main interests center on how children learn language - in particular he focuses a lot on early word learning, and what that tells us about our other cognitive functions, like concept formation and social cognition.
We discuss that, his love for developing open data sets that anyone can use,
The dance he dances between bottom-up data-driven approaches in this big data era, traditional experimental approaches, and top-down theory-driven approaches
How early language learning in children differs from LLM learning
Mike's rational speech act model of language use, which considers the intentions or pragmatics of speakers and listeners in dialogue.
- Language & Cognition Lab
- Twitter: @mcxfrank.
- I mentioned Mike's tweet thread about saying LLMs "have" cognitive functions:
- Related papers:
- Pragmatic language interpretation as probabilistic inference.
- Toward a “Standard Model” of Early Language Learning.
- The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language.
- The Structure of Developmental Variation in Early Childhood.
- Relational reasoning and generalization using non-symbolic neural networks.
- Unsupervised neural network models of the ventral visual stream.
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
My guest is Michael C. Frank, better known as Mike Frank, who runs the Language and Cognition lab at Stanford. Mike's main interests center on how children learn language - in particular he focuses a lot on early word learning, and what that tells us about our other cognitive functions, like concept formation and social cognition.
We discuss that, his love for developing open data sets that anyone can use,
The dance he dances between bottom-up data-driven approaches in this big data era, traditional experimental approaches, and top-down theory-driven approaches
How early language learning in children differs from LLM learning
Mike's rational speech act model of language use, which considers the intentions or pragmatics of speakers and listeners in dialogue.
- Language & Cognition Lab
- Twitter: @mcxfrank.
- I mentioned Mike's tweet thread about saying LLMs "have" cognitive functions:
- Related papers:
- Pragmatic language interpretation as probabilistic inference.
- Toward a “Standard Model” of Early Language Learning.
- The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language.
- The Structure of Developmental Variation in Early Childhood.
- Relational reasoning and generalization using non-symbolic neural networks.
- Unsupervised neural network models of the ventral visual stream.
Previous Episode
BI 170 Ali Mohebi: Starting a Research Lab
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In this episode I have a casual chat with Ali Mohebi about his new faculty position and his plans for the future.
- Ali's website.
- Twitter: @mohebial
Next Episode
BI 172 David Glanzman: Memory All The Way Down
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David runs his lab at UCLA where he's also a distinguished professor. David used to believe what is currently the mainstream view, that our memories are stored in our synapses, those connections between our neurons. So as we learn, the synaptic connections strengthen and weaken until their just right, and that serves to preserve the memory. That's been the dominant view in neuroscience for decades, and is the fundamental principle that underlies basically all of deep learning in AI. But because of his own and others experiments, which he describes in this episode, David has come to the conclusion that memory must be stored not at the synapse, but in the nucleus of neurons, likely by some epigenetic mechanism mediated by RNA molecules. If this sounds familiar, I had Randy Gallistel on the the podcast on episode 126 to discuss similar ideas, and David discusses where he and Randy differ in their thoughts. This episode starts out pretty technical as David describes the series of experiments that changed his mind, but after that we broaden our discussion to a lot of the surrounding issues regarding whether and if his story about memory is true. And we discuss meta-issues like how old discarded ideas in science often find their way back, what it's like studying non-mainstream topic, including challenges trying to get funded for it, and so on.
- David's Faculty Page.
- Related papers
- David mentions many of the ideas from the Pushing the Boundaries: Neuroscience, Cognition, and Life Symposium.
- Related episodes:
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