Not-Your-Mother’s-Connectionism: LLMs as Cognitive Models

Join us for a talk by Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. This talk is part of the Kempner Seminar Series, a research-level seminar series on recent advances in the field.

Recent advances in AI have led to large neural network models which exhibit human-like behavior across a range of language and reasoning tasks. This (re-)opens important theoretical questions about the nature of the structure that is required to support such behaviors, leading to debates reminiscent of long-running arguments that pit neural network models against explicitly structured symbolic models of the mind. In this talk, I will describe a series of experiments which highlight the ways in which LLMs today appear importantly different from the connectionist systems that inspired these debates originally. I will argue for a more nuanced stance which does not assume neural networks to be diametrically opposed to traditional models of the mind, but still acknowledges the potential of LLMs to teach us something fundamentally new about the structures that govern language and cognition in humans.

Coming from Longwood? Sign up to take the shuttle.