Now they're using pairs of epilepsy patients, talking to each other.
Context contingent networks is the new wordcloud. But this is literally the baby steps of mind-reading, word-by-word:
Brain activity associated with specific words is mirrored between speaker and listener during a conversation
Aug 2024, phys.org
The team collected brain activity data and conversation transcripts from pairs of epilepsy patients during natural conversations, using electrocorticography and GPT-2"We can see linguistic content emerge word-by-word in the speaker's brain before they actually articulate what they're trying to say, and the same linguistic content rapidly reemerges in the listener's brain after they hear it."Word-specific brain activity peaked in the speaker's brain around 250 ms before they spoke each word, and corresponding spikes in brain activity associated with the same words appeared in the listener's brain approximately 250 ms after they heard them.
via Princeton and New York University School of Medicine Comprehensive Epilepsy Center: A shared model-based linguistic space for transmitting our thoughts from brain to brain in natural conversations, Neuron (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.06.025.
Image credit: AI Art - Young Businessman Robot - 2024
Words like 'this' and 'that' act as attention tools across languages
Jul 2024, phys.org
This and that and here and there are 'demonstrative' words are used to direct listeners' focus of attention and to establish joint attention.There is debate about whether directing the listener's attention - the 'mentalistic' representation - is part of the meaning (semantics) of demonstratives, or whether it arises from general principles of social cognition (pragmatics). The researchers used computational modeling and experiments with speakers of ten different languages from eight different language groups to investigate this question.Results showed that participants were not only sensitive to the location of the target but also to the listener's attention. As expected, the meaning of demonstratives varied within and across languages. For example, the 'near' demonstrative (such as English 'this one') sometimes had a spatial meaning ('the one close to me'). But it also had a joint attention meaning ('the one we are both looking at') or a 'mentalistic' meaning ('the one over here'), directing the listener's attention towards the speaker.Interestingly, speakers of languages with a three-word system used the medial word (such as Spanish 'ese') to indicate joint attention.
via Yale University and the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen: Jara-Ettinger, Julian et al, Demonstratives as attention tools: Evidence of mentalistic representations within language, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2402068121.
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