Incomding PhD student @ MIT BCS
Google Scholar || CV
Welcome to my webpage!
I am an incoming PhD student at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
I want to understand 1) what makes us such effective communicators, teachers, and learners, and 2) how we are able to develop rich, productive theories which revolve around entities we cannot perceive. How do we efficiently communicate our theories, both scientific and intuitive, to each other in both everyday situations and more formal settings? How do we represent abstract concepts like electrons or inflation, which we primarily learn about through other people's language? To what extent are our representations of these concepts tied to our linguistic abilities?
Prior to grad school, I worked as a lab tech in the Kanwisher Lab at MIT for two years. I mainly contributed to projects using fMRI in new and interesting ways, such as scanning concurrently with electrical stimulation to map out connectivity patterns (es-fMRI), or by using an Efficient Localizer to define many functionally-specific cortical regions simultaneously. You can read about that Efficient Localizer project here!
I completed my undergrad at Columbia University, studying cognitive science and computer science, and working in the Dynamic Perception and Memory Lab with Dr. Chris Baldassano. There, I worked on projects comparing internal representations from GPT-2 to human fMRI responses, and, for my senior thesis, to human behavioral measures of surprise.
Hopefully more to come soon!
Hutchinson, S., Marvi, A., Kamps, F., Chen, E., Fedorenko, E., Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2024). An Efficient Multimodal fMRI Localizer for High-Level Visual, Auditory, and Cognitive Regions in Humans. Journal of Vision, 24, 668. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.10.668
Lee, C. S., Cohen, S. S., Hutchinson, S., Tottenham, N., & Baldassano, C. (2024). Neural and verbal responses to attachment-schema narratives differ based on past and current caregiving experiences. bioRxiv, 2024-09. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.13.612953
Bloom, P. A., Bartlett, E., Kathios, N., Algharazi, S., Siegelman, M., Shen, F., Beresford, L., DiMaggio-Potter, M., Singh, A., Bennett, S., Natarajan, N., Lee, H., Sajid, S., Joyce, E., Fischman, R., Hutchinson, S., Pan, S. Tottenham, N., & Aly, M. (2023). Effects of familiar music exposure on deliberate retrieval of remote episodic and semantic memories in healthy aging adults. Memory, 31(3), 428-456. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2023.2166078
Here is where you can find other coding and writing that I like to do, usually on related topics but presented in a less-formal way!
A little app I made for visualizing the GPT-2 surprisal and attention weight of each token in an arbitrary sequence! Here is the GitHub repo!
2022 Article for the Gadfly, Columbia’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. An analysis of how progressive social movements and conservative media outlets mobilize linguistic and rhetorical strategies identified by both Fanon and Nietzsche. You can read the article on the Gadfly's website here.