BI 164 Gary Lupyan: How Language Affects Thought

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Gary Lupyan runs the Lupyan Lab at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studies how language and cognition are related. In some ways, this is a continuation of the conversation I had last episode with Ellie Pavlick, in that we  partly continue to discuss large language models. But Gary is more focused on how language, and naming things, categorizing things, changes our cognition related those things. How does naming something change our perception of it, and so on. He's interested in how concepts come about, how they map onto language. So we talk about some of his work and ideas related to those topics.

And we actually start the discussion with some of Gary's work related the variability of individual humans' phenomenal experience, and how that affects our individual cognition. For instance, some people are more visual thinkers, others are more verbal, and there seems to be an appreciable spectrum of differences that Gary is beginning to experimentally test.

Lupyan Lab.

Twitter: @glupyan.

Related papers:

Hidden Differences in Phenomenal Experience.

Verbal interference paradigms: A systematic review investigating the role of language in cognition.

Gary mentioned Richard Feynman's Ways of Thinking video.

Gary and Andy Clark's Aeon article: Super-cooperators.

0:00 - Intro
2:36 - Words and communication
14:10 - Phenomenal variability
26:24 - Co-operating minds
38:11 - Large language models
40:40 - Neuro-symbolic AI, scale
44:43 - How LLMs have changed Gary's thoughts about language
49:26 - Meaning, grounding, and language
54:26 - Development of language
58:53 - Symbols and emergence
1:03:20 - Language evolution in the LLM era
1:08:05 - Concepts
1:11:17 - How special is language?
1:18:08 - AGI