Plenary Panel Session

Friday, May 23, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM 

Human Language and Thought in the Era of Large Language Models

Chair: APS President Randi C. Martin, Rice University 

This panel brings together leading early career voices whose work 
engages with the relationship between human language and LLMs. How do these advances in language technologies influence how we think about and study the psychology and neurobiology of human language processing? 

The capacity to rapidly communicate and think with language is a remarkable human ability that has been argued to separate humans from other forms of intelligence, biological or artificial. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence, specifically large language models (LLMs), appear to be approaching human-like performance. This symposium brings together leading early career voices whose work engages with the relationship between human language and LLMs. How do these advances in language technologies influence how we think about and study the psychology and neurobiology of human language processing? 

Speaker: Laura Gwilliams, Stanford University 

Dr. Laura Gwilliams, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University, is an expert in understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie our ability to comprehend speech. Her work focuses on understanding the representations the brain derives from auditory input and the computations that are applied to those representations to allow us to understand meaning, to inform both our understanding of the human brain and our ability to build intelligent machines. 

Speaker: Alexander Huth, The University of Texas at Austin 

Dr. Alexander Huth, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Computer Science, University of Texas, Austin, is an expert in using quantitative, computational methods to understand how the human brain represents meaning. His work focuses on how to build encoding models, like neural network language models, that predict human brain responses while people listen to podcasts or watch movies, with the goal of understanding how language is represented across the brain. He is exploring potential applications for decoding intended messages from the brain signals of those with disrupted language following brain damage. 

Speaker: Anna Ivanova, Georgia Institute of Technology 

Dr. Anna Ivanova, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Georgia Tech, is an expert in understanding the relationship between language, intelligence, and human thought. Her work focuses on the interaction between the neural circuits responsible for language and thought, the relationship between large language models and human cognition, and the role of inner speech on thought. 

Moderator: L. Robert Slevc, University of Maryland, College Park 

L. Robert Slevc, Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Maryland. His expertise is in the processing of language and music and the extent to which the same brain regions support both.