Readings and Videos
With the exception of the first two weeks of the semester, required readings should be completed by Wednesday's class, in which there will be an initial discussion of these readings that will usually be led by one or more students. Optional readings provide additional background to assist your understanding of the primary papers, or further details on cited work that may be of interest. Videos from the Brains, Minds and Machines summer school and other venues provide useful background for the readings and Friday lectures.
This page will be continually updated throughout the semester.
Week 1 (9/9 & 9/11): The Analysis of Faces
Required reading (for Friday 9/11 class):
Tsao, D. Y. & Livingstone, M. S. (2008)
Mechanisms of Face Perception, Annual Reviews of Neuroscience, 31, 411-437.
Useful video for Friday's reading:
Nancy Kanwisher has created a nice collection of videos on methods for studying the human brain and what we can learn
from these methods, posted at: nancysbraintalks.mit.edu. Watch this 6-minute
video on "What is fMRI?"
Video showing the influence of lighting on face perception: (suggested by Nicole Seo) Sparkles and Wine - Teaser, from Nacho Guzman
Optional reading:
Sinha, P., Bales, B., Ostrovsky, Y., Russell, R. (2006)
Face Recognition by Humans: Nineteen Results all Computer Vision Researchers Should Know About,
Proceedings of the IEEE, 94(11), 1948-1962.
Viola, P., Jones, M. J. (2004)
Robust Real-Time Face Detection
International Journal of Computer Vision, 57(2), 137-154.
Week 2 (9/16 & 9/18): Recognition of Faces and Complex Objects
Required reading (for Friday 9/18 class):
Ullman, S., Harari, D., Dorfman, N. (2012)
From Simple Innate Biases to Complex Visual Concepts,
PNAS, 109(44), 18215-18220. This pdf file also contains supplementary material for the
article, which is optional reading.
Dorfman, N., Harari, D., Ullman, S. (2013)
Learning to Perceive Coherent Objects,
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - CogSci, 394-399.
Baillargeon, R. (2004) Infants' Physical World,
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(3), 89-94.
Video (for Wednesday 9/16 class):
Winrich Freiwald (Rockefeller),
Taking Apart the Neural Circuits of Face Processing, given at the 2014 Brains, Minds, and Machines summer school.
Week 3 (9/23 & 9/25): Recognition of Faces and Objects in the Ventral Stream
Required reading (for Wednesday 9/23 class):
Serre, T., Kreiman, G., Kouh, M., Cadieu, C. Knoblich, U., &
Poggio, T. (2007)
A Quantitative Theory of Immediate Visual Recognition,
Progress in Brain Research, 165, 33-56.
Optional reading:
Freiwald, W. A., Tsao, D. Y. (2010)
Functional Compartmentalization and Viewpoint Generalization within the Macaque Face-Processing System,
Science, 330(6005), 845-851.
Liao, Q., Leibo, J. Z., Poggio, T. (2013)
Learning Invariant Representations and Applications to Face Verification,
Tan, Cheston, Poggio, T. (2014) Neural Tuning Size is a Key Factor
Underlying Holistic Face Processing, CBMM Memo No. 21.
Week 4 (9/30 & 10/2): Cognitive Development: Objects and Agents
Required reading:
Teglas, E., Vul, E., Girotto, V., Gonzalez, M., Tenenbaum, J. B., Bonatti, L. L. (2011)
Pure Reasoning in 12-Month-Old Infants as Probabilistic Inference,
Science, 332, 1054-1059. Optional:
Supplementary material for the Teglas et al. article.
Baillargeon, R. (1998)
Infants' Understanding of the Physical World, in
Advances in Psychological Science, Vol. 2: Biological and Cognitive Aspects,
M. Sabourin, F. Craik, R. Michele (Eds.), Hove England: Psychology Press/Erlbaum, 503-529.
Optional reading:
There are two chapters of a forthcoming book by Elizabeth Spelke posted in the Materials section of the
course site on stellar — the chapters are on "Objects" and "Agents" — please do not quote or
circulate material from these chapters:
https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/9/fa15/9.523/.
Baker, C. L., Saxe, R., Tenenbaum, J. B. (2009)
Action Understanding as Inverse Planning, Cognition,113(3), 329-349.
Battaglia, P. W., Hamrick, J. B., Tenenbaum, J. B. (2013)
Simulation as an Engine of Physical Scene Understanding, PNAS, 110(45), 18327-18332.
Piantadosi, S. T., Tenenbaum, J. B., Goodman, N. D. (2012)
Bootstrapping
in a Language of Thought: A Formal Model of Numerical Concept Learning, Cognition, 123, 199-217.
Kemp, C., Xu, F. (2009), An Ideal Observer Model of Infant Object Perception,
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 21.
Skerry, A. E., Carey, S. E., Spelke, E. S. (2013)
First-person Action Experience Reveals Sensitivity to Action
Efficiency in Prereaching Infants, PNAS, 110(46), 18728-18733.
Week 5 (10/7 & 10/9): Bayesian Models of Cognition
Required reading:
Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J. B., Griffiths, T. L., Xu, F. (2011)
A Tutorial Introduction to Bayesian Models of Cognitive Development, Cognition, 120, 302-321.
Optional reading:
Gershman, S. J., Horvitz, E. J., Tenenbaum, J. B. (2015)
Computational Rationality: A Converging Paradigm for Intelligence in Brains, Minds, and Machines, Science, 349(6245), 273-278.
Tenenbaum, J. B., Kemp, C., Griffiths, T. L., Goodman, N. D. (2011)
How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction, Science, 331, 1279-1285.
Week 6 (10/14 & 10/16): Development of Intuitive Physics and Psychology
Required reading:
Ullman, T. D., Goodman, N. D., Tenenbaum, J. B. (2012)
Theory Learning as Stochastic Search in the Language of Thought, Cognitive Development, 27(4), 455-480.
Schulz, L. (2012) The Origins of Inquiry: Inductive
Inference and Exploration in Early Childhood, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(7), 382-389.
Week 7 (10/21 & 10/23): Recognition by Humans under Occlusion
Required reading:
Tang, H., Buia, C., Madhavan, R., Crone, N. E., Madsen, J. R., Anderson, W. A. & Kreiman, G. (2014)
Spatiotemporal Dynamics Underlying Object Completion in Human Ventral Visual Cortex,
Neuron, 83, 1-13.
Optional reading:
Hopfield, J. J. (1982) Neural Networks and Physical Systems with
Emergent Collective Computational Abilities, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 79, 2554-2558.
Hung, C., Kreiman, G., Poggio, T., DiCarlo, J. (2005)
Fast Readout of Object Identity from Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex, Science, 310, 863-866.
Supplementary materials.
Week 8 (10/28 & 10/30): Audition in Brains & Machines
Required reading:
McDermott, J. H., Simoncelli, E. P. (2011)
Sound Texture Perception via Statistics of the Auditory Periphery: Evidence from Sound Synthesis,
Neuron, 71, 926-940. (Document includes optional supplemental material.)
Optional reading:
McDermott, J. H. (2013) Audition, in Oxford Handbook of
Cognitive Neuroscience (eds Ochsner & Kosslyn), Oxford University Press.
Week 9 (11/4 & 11/6): Integration of Vision and Language
Required reading:
Berzak, Y., Barbu, A., Harari, D., Katz, B., Ullman, S. (2015)
Do You See What I Mean? Visual Resolution
of Linguistic Ambiguities, Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language
Processing, Lisbon, Portugal, 1477-1487.
Siddharth, N., Babu, A., Siskind, J. M. (2014)
Seeing What You're Told: Sentence-Guided Activity Recognition in Video, IEEE Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
Optional reading:
Farhadi, A., Hejrati, M., Sadeghi, M. A., Young, P., Rashtchian, C., Hockenmaier, J.,
Forsyth, D. (2010)
Every Picture Tells a Story: Generating Sentences from Images, European Conference on
Computer Vision, pp. 15-29.
Week 10 (11/13): Understanding Stories
Required reading:
Winston, P. H. (2014)
The Genesis Story Understanding and Story Telling System: A 21st Century Step toward
Artificial Intelligence, CBMM Memo No. 019.
Optional reading:
Winston, P. H. (2012)
The Right Way, Advances in Cognitive Systems, 1, 23-36.
Tattarsall, I. (2008)
An Evolutionary Framework for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition by Homo sapiens
Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 3, 99-114.
Week 11 (11/18 & 11/20): Functional Architecture for Intelligence
Required reading:
Fedorenko, E., Behr, M. K., Kanwisher, N. (2011)
Functional Specificity for High-Level Linguistic Processing in the Human Brain,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 16428-16433. Optional:
Supplemental
material.
Fedorenko, E., Duncan, J., Kanwisher, N. (2012)
Language-Selective and Domain-General Regions Lie Side by Side within Broca's Area, Current Biology,
22, 2059-2062.
Optional reading:
Deen, B., Koldewyn, K., Kanwisher, N., Saxe, R. (2015)
Functional Organization of Social Perception and Cognition in the Superior Temporal Sulcus, Cerebral Cortex, 1-14.
Week 12 (12/2 & 12/4): Hippocampus, Memory & Sleep
Required reading:
Davidson, T. J., Kloosterman, F., Wilson, M. A. (2009)
Hippocampal Replay of Extended Experience, Neuron, 63, 497-507.
Bendor, D., Wilson, M. (2012)
Biasing the Content of Hippocampal Replay During Sleep, Nature Neuroscience 15: 1439-1444.
Optional reading:
Milford, M., Wyeth, G. (2010)
Persistent Navigation and Mapping Using a Biologically Inspired SLAM System
The International Journal of Robotics Research 29(9), 1131-1153.
For your information, the following is a link to the website for the RatSLAM OpenSource code:
https://openslam.org/openratslam.html
Mittelman, R., Kuipers, B., Savarese, S., Lee, H. (2014)
Structured Recurrent Temporal Restricted Boltzmann Machines,
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning.