Su chats with Dr. Roger Levy. Dr. Levy is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he directs the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. His research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing and acquisition of natural language. His work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing and acquisition, combining computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation, and analysis of large, naturalistic language datasets, to help design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language. In today's episode, we discuss his research background together with his recent work "The Science of Language in the Era of Generative AI".

Roger’s review: https://mit-genai.pubpub.org/pub/ak3evnmm/release/1 

Roger’s lab website: http://cpl.mit.edu/  

Roger’s personal website: https://www.mit.edu/~rplevy/ 

Su’s Twitter: https://x.com/sudkrc 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

In today’s episode, Adani chats with Adam Benforado, a lawyer, writer, and professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law. Adam’s research, teaching, and advocacy are focused on children’s rights and criminal justice, and he brings insights from the mind sciences—most notably cognitive psychology—to law and legal theory. In this conversation, Adam tells us about his latest book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All, laying out the multifaceted, complex context around children’s rights and parental authority in the U.S. Adam also shares how he first got to work on the issues he now champions and what his future vision is, for children and society more broadly.

Adam’s website: https://www.adambenforado.com/
Adam’s book, A Minor Revolution: https://www.adambenforado.com/a-minor-revolution
Adam’s twitter: @Benforado
Adam’s new organization, Minor Power: ​​https://www.minorpower.org/

Adani’s website: https://www.adaniabutto.com
Adani’s Bluesky: @adani

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod 
Podcast Substack 

Stanford Psychology Podcast - Newsletter for the official Stanford Psychology Podcast!

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

Su chats with Dr. Yuan Chang (YC) Leong. YC is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Lab, which is a part of the Department of Psychology, a member of the Institute of Mind and Biology and the Neuroscience Institute, and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute. His research explores the neural and computational mechanisms underlying how goals, beliefs, and emotions influence human cognition, with a focus on why people interpret and respond to identical situations in different ways. In today's episode, we discuss what’s on YC intellectual radar these days, alongside with his recent paper "Dynamic brain connectivity predicts emotional arousal during naturalistic movie-watching," in which they show that we can decode arousal with open movie fMRI datasets.

YC’s paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215238/ 

YC’s lab website: https://mcnlab.uchicago.edu/ 

YC’s personal website: https://ycleong.github.io/ 

Su’s Twitter @sudkrc

Su’s Bluesky @sudkrc.bsky.social 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Bluesky @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

Su chats with Dr. Jennifer Hu. Jenn is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, directing the Group for Language and Intelligence. Her research examines the computational principles that underlie human language, and how language and cognition might be achieved by artificial models. In her work to answer these questions, she combines cognitive science and machine learning, with the dual goals of understanding the human mind and safely advancing artificial intelligence. We are discussing Jenn’s paper titled “Signatures of human-like processing in Transformer forward passes."

Jenn’s paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14107 

Jenn’s lab website: https://www.glintlab.org/ 

Jenn’s personal website: https://jennhu.github.io/ 

Su’s Twitter: https://x.com/sudkrc 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

Elizabeth chats with Dr. Dawn Finzi, a Machine Learning engineer on the Perception team at Zoox, and a recent alumni of our very own Stanford’s Department of Psychology, as a part of our new Psychologist in the Wild series. During her PhD, Dawn studied the functional organization of the human visual system, focusing on both the structural underpinnings and the overarching computational goals. In this episode, Dawn shares her scientific journey from PhD to industry, and how her PhD experience translates to her current role at Zoox. 

If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.

Dawn’s website: https://www.dawnfinzi.com/

Elizabeth’s: website: imelizabeth.github.io

Elizabeth’s BlueSky: @imelizabeth.bsky.social

Podcast BlueSky @StanfordPsyPod.bsky.social

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

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Jane chats with Dr. David Almeida, a  Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He is the Principal Investigator of the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE), the largest longitudinal diary study of daily experiences and health in the United States. Dr. Almeida’s work examines how daily experiences of stress are associated with health and well-being. 

In this episode, Jane and Dr. Almeida discuss the ways in which people experience and react to stress in their daily lives, who is most likely to experience and be reactive to stress, ways to manage stress, and even some unexpected upside of experiencing stress in daily life.

If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.

Some papers relevant to today’s discussion: 

•  Changes in daily stress reactivity and changes in physical health across 18 years of adulthood
• Longitudinal change in daily stress across 20 years of adulthood: Results from the National Study of Daily Experiences
• The Mixed Benefits of a Stressor-Free Life 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

In this episode, Su chats with Diyi Yang, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, affiliated with the Stanford NLP Group, Stanford Human Computer Interaction Group, Stanford AI Lab, and Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She is also leading the Social and Language Technologies Lab, where they study Socially Aware Natural Language Processing. Her research goal is to better understand human communication in social context and build socially aware language technologies via methods of NLP, deep learning, and machine learning as well as theories in social sciences and linguistics, to support human-human and human-computer interaction.

In today's episode, we discuss her interdisciplinary approach to research, along with her recent paper "Social Skill Training with Large Language Models," which introduces a new framework that supports making social skill training more available, accessible, and inviting.

Diyi’s paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04204

Diyi’s lab website: https://cs.stanford.edu/~diyiy/group.html 

Diyi’s personal website: https://cs.stanford.edu/~diyiy/index.html 

Su’s Twitter: @sudkrc

Podcast Twitter: @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Bluesky: @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social

Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

This episode was recorded on February 5, 2025.

This week, Misha chats with Katy Milkman, the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, her research explores how insights from economics and psychology can be harnessed to change consequential behaviors for good. Her work, published in journals like Nature and PNAS, has been recognized by Thinkers50 as among the world’s most influential in management thinking.

In this episode, they discuss Katy’s influential work designing “megastudies” to generate new insights about behavior change, as well as lessons from her bestselling book, How to Change. Katy also shares her perspective on translating scientific findings for a broad audience and the vital role of mentorship in academia.

If you found this episode interesting, subscribe to our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second, but it will allow us to reach more people and excite them about psychology.

Links:
Katy's book: How to Change
Katy's Website: Link
Choiceology Podcast: Link
Behavior Change for Good Initiative: Link

Misha’s website: Link

Podcast Twitter: @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Bluesky: @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social
Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you think of this episode or the podcast! :) [email protected]

This week, Misha chats with Julian Jara-Ettinger, Associate Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Yale University. Julian directs the Computational Social Cognition Lab, which aims to reveal the fundamental representations and computations that make complex human social behavior possible. His work combines computational modeling, developmental studies, and cross-cultural research to build a blueprint for more human-like social intelligence.

In this episode, we discuss his recent paper, "Tracking minds in communication," which challenges the classical view of language and social reasoning as separate systems. They explore how our brains constantly run social "micro-processes" in real-time to track other minds, a fundamental ability that guides our communication. They also dive into Julian's academic journey, his vision for the future of computational social cognition, and how he successfully navigates the interdisciplinary landscape of cognitive science.

If you found this episode interesting, subscribe to our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second, but it will allow us to reach more people and excite them about psychology.

Links: 

Julian's paper "Tracking minds in communication": https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(24)00312-7

Julian's Lab Website: https://compdevlab.yale.edu/

Julian's Faculty Page: https://psychology.yale.edu/people/julian-jara-ettinger

Misha's website: https://www.mishaokeeffe.com/

Podcast Twitter: @StanfordPsyPod Podcast Bluesky: @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you think of this episode or the podcast! :) [email protected]

In this re-air episode from summer 2021 (one of our first!), Anjie chats with Judy Fan, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Judy’s research is at the intersection of computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. In this episode, she discusses a new line of research in her lab exploring how people learn about objects by trying to build them from scratch. She and her team recruited people online to play a game where they aimed to reconstruct various block towers and analyzed the types of mistakes they made, as well as how they got better at the game over time. Insights from experiments like these may help reveal the cognitive principles that govern how people "reverse-engineer" how things are made — from how an unfamiliar dish was prepared to how a song was composed.

You can learn more about this project by visiting this site: https://github.com/cogtoolslab/block_construction and read their paper here: https://cogtoolslab.github.io/pdf/mccarthy_cogsci_2020.pdf

To learn more about Judy Fan's research, check out her lab's website: https://cogtoolslab.github.io/.

You can also follow her on Twitter (@judyefan).