Jesse Gomez (Professor Grill-Spector Lab): Microstructural proliferation in human cortex is coupled with the development of face processing Robert Hawkins (Professor Goodman's Lab): Convention-formation in iterated reference games

Title: Microstructural proliferation in human cortex is coupled with the development of face processing Abstract: How does cortical tissue change as brain function and behavior improve from childhood to adulthood? By combining quantitative and functional magnetic resonance imaging in children and adults, we find differential development of high-level visual areas that are involved in face and place recognition. Development of face-selective regions, but not place-selective regions, is dominated by microstructural proliferation. This tissue development is correlated with specific increases in functional selectivity to faces, as well as improvements in face recognition, and ultimately leads to differentiated tissue properties between face- and place-selective regions in adulthood, which we validate with postmortem cytoarchitectonic measurements. These data suggest a new model by which emergent brain function and behavior result from cortical tissue proliferation rather than from pruning exclusively. 

Convention-formation in iterated reference gamesAbstract: What cognitive mechanisms support the emergence of linguistic conventions from repeated interaction? We present results from a large-scale, multi-player replication of the classic tangrams task which demonstrate three key empirical signatures constraining theories of convention-formation: arbitrariness, stability, and reduction of utterance length over time. These results motivate a theory of convention-formation where agents, though initially uncertain about word meanings in context, assume others are using language with such knowledge. Thus, agents may learn about meanings by reasoning about a knowledgeable, informative partner; if all agents engage in such a process, they successfully coordinate their beliefs, giving rise to a conventional communication system. We formalize this theory in a computational model of language understanding as social inference and demonstrate that it produces all three signatures.