PhD student at MIT. Philosophy of language, philosophy of cog sci, philosophy of mind. Lower-case chomskyan, upper-case Nerd.
Juan Murillo Vargas
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Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1
Philosophy is easy, all you have to do is tell people about episodes of Seinfeld
I wrote a piece for the Yale Review on AI and "jagged intelligence". (Note: headline was not written by me.)
yalereview.org/article/mela...
Separating Cognitive Development From Language Development in the Acquisition of Negation Using International Adoption
📣From Annika McDermott-Hinman, Samuel Zimmerman, Jesse Snedeker & Roman Feiman
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…another creative & impactful project from the rocket-fueled @talboger.bsky.social, applying the wickedly cool “visual anagrams” method to animacy! Read the paper in @elife.bsky.social today, then attend his presentation at @socphilpsych.bsky.social later this week. 🦆✈️
Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!
⭐️From Elizabeth Lapidow, Amberley Stein, Giovanni Thomas & Caren Walker:
Young Children Use Causal Knowledge to Guide Question Asking
arxiv.org/abs/2605.31514
I’m joining linguistics at MIT this fall. Sad to leave UMass, but also excited about learning from people at MIT linguistics!
秋学期からマサチューセッツ工科大学の言語学科で働きます。UMassを去るのは寂しいですが、新しい環境が楽しみでもあります。
whamit.mit.edu/2026/05/11/
Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates?
In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes!
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Abstract. Question asking is essential for learning in childhood. But options for possible questions are nearly infinite. We investigate whether causal kno
Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthro...
Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates?
In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes!
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Shota Momma
tal boger
Video
Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8
