Cognitive Science Colloquium Series: Human-level cross-sensory mappings from language alone
Event description
- Academic events
- Science
Our speaker for this colloquium is assistant professor of psychology from Berkeley University, William Thompson.
Talk title
Human-level cross-sensory mappings from language alone
Talk abstract
If the taste of red wine were a musical genre, what genre would it be? As humans we can readily make connections across sensory modalities—describing sounds as bright, tastes as sharp, or smells as sweet. I will discuss a systematic study of cross-sensory mappings in a large sample of human participants.
Perhaps more than any other kind of reasoning, creative sensory reasoning seems deeply dependent on embodied first-person experience. For this reason, it was a surprise to discover that a neural network trained on language alone (GPT 3.5) can readily produce cross-sensory mappings that source-blind human raters say are better, more creative, and more deeply considered than matched mappings produced by our participants. I will discuss these results in the context of a broader question about cultural transmission in human populations: how much knowledge can be inherited simply by learning a language?