Tommy Botch Wins the Neukom Institute Outstanding Graduate Research in Computational Science Second Prize

Tommy Botch, a PBS graduate student in Assistant Professor Emily Finn's lab, was awarded second prize for Outstanding Graduate Research in Computational Science by the Neukom Institute.

In a breif statement about his winning project, Tommy writes, "Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used across disciplines and, within the field of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, are commonly suggested as substitutes for human behavior. However, humans learn language primarily through a spoken modality while LLMs are often trained solely on written text. Our work evaluates how stimulus poverty – here, the removal of auditory information – impacts language processing and prediction within humans and LLMs. We found that human predictions of spoken language were more accurate and more closely aligned with human brain activity than both human predictions of written text and LLM predictions. Together, these results suggest that human predictions of written text represent a theoretical ceiling on what LLMs can achieve in both behavior and representation."