Emalie McMahon
Postdoc at MIT | Formerly Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins
emaliemcmahon.github.io
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonHumans are sensitive to many different types of social interactions, but it has been difficult to isolate these differences in the human brain In this new preprint @yuanfangzhao.bsky.social w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social applied data-driven methods to two fMRI video datasets to address this 1/n
- New preprint out! “Separate Neural Representations for Physical and Communicative Social Interactions: Evidence from Data-driven Voxel Decomposition” w/ @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social @lisik.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonAlternative title: "LLMs don't have ears (or eyes)" What do humans and machines miss out on when processing language as purely written text, without all the embodied audiovisual richness that scaffolds language in daily human contexts? Very proud of this elegant work from @tommybotch.bsky.social
- New preprint! Thrilled to share my latest work with @esfinn.bsky.social -- "Sensory context as a universal principle of language in humans and LLMs" osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonOn Friday, my son stayed home from school because he had a sore throat and wasn’t feeling well. He went with my husband to his office for the morning while I handled our daughter. When he came back at lunch, he was not interested in eating, saying his throat hurt too much. 1/n
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonI'm incredibly honored to be a recipient of this year's Glushko Prize. I've looked up to so many past winners over the years, so it's surreal to be getting one myself. Thanks to Bob Glushko and the prize committee, as well as to my advisor Brian Scholl and Sam McDougle for their letters of support.
- Join us in congratulating the rising stars of #CogSci 🌟 We're excited to introduce the 2025 Glushko Prize winners, and the fascinating research behind their work!
- 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
- We find that visual social primitives, such as how far apart two people are in a video, are decodable from EEG earlier than social interactions features like whether two people are communicating.
- The EEG signal predicts early visual cortex (EVC) with a very short latency. However, mid-level and high-level regions in the lateral visual pathway are represented with a similar latency, suggesting that the lateral visual stream may not be organized in a strict feedforward hierarchy.
-
View full threadIn closing, I want to thank my amazing advisors for supervising this work. I could not have imagined a better place to earn my PhD than the Department of Cognitive Science at @jhuartssciences.bsky.social
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonI still can't believe this! I'm deeply grateful to Bob Glushko and to @cogscisociety.bsky.social for this award. Huge thanks to my advisors @sabinehunnius.bsky.social and @neuroecologylab.bsky.social, and to many more collaborators, all the work in my thesis would have been impossible without them!
- Join us in congratulating the rising stars of #CogSci 🌟 We're excited to introduce the 2025 Glushko Prize winners, and the fascinating research behind their work!
- It is truly an honor to be recognized as a Glushko prize winner among all these incredible scientists. Thank you to the prize committee and to my PhD advisors @lisik.bsky.social and Mick Bonner.
- Join us in congratulating the rising stars of #CogSci 🌟 We're excited to introduce the 2025 Glushko Prize winners, and the fascinating research behind their work!
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonNew paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network** with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n 🧵
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonHey, just a quiet reminder: it’s not true that people get more conservative as they age. *Populations* get more conservative as they age because poor and marginalized people die sooner. nymag.com/intelligence...
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonNew preprint “Monkey See, Model Knew: LLMs accurately predict visual responses in humans AND NHPs” Led by Colin Conwell with @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social Akshay Jagadeesh, Kasper Vinken @amrahs-inolas.bsky.social @jacob-prince.bsky.social George Alvarez @taliakonkle.bsky.social & Marge Livingstone 1/n
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonWe wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonI promised to write about my thoughts on the status of the field of neuroAI, some of the big challenges we are facing, and the approaches we are taking to address them. This is super selective on the topic of finding a good model but in my view it affects the field as a whole. Here we go. 🧵
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonMonkey See, Model Knew: LLMs accurately Predict Human AND Macaque Visual Brain Activity Colin Conwell, @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social, Akshay Vivek Jagadeesh, Kasper Vinken, @amrahs-inolas.bsky.social, @jacob-prince.bsky.social, George Alvarez, @taliakonkle.bsky.social and Marge Livingstone
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonThis new article perfectly concludes my time & lessons in Jim’s lab.@JamesJDiCarlo and I propose +review SMART models of object recognition ✅ Sensory computable ✅ Mechanistic ✅ Anatomically Referenced ✅ Testable Coming in Annual Reviews 2024 Preprint: bit.ly/3tk7u8D
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonFirst post here - sharing that our paper on infants' representation of third-party helping interactions is now published (OA) at the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology! www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonI am super excited to share our preprint "Early neural development of social perception: evidence from voxel-wise encoding in young children and adults" with Angira Shirahatti and @lisik.bsky.social !! osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Emalie McMahonOur paper "Hierarchical organization of social action features in the lateral visual stream" led by @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social with Mick Bonner is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
