The Mind, Brain, & Computation Lab is part of Dartmouth's interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, and graduate students complete their PhD work in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

We are interested in questions like: What makes humans so cognitively adept in some cases and so profoundly limited in others? For example, why can we immediately understand new sentences such as "The Dalai Lama did a backflip into the Connecticut River", but fail to remember the names of people we've met many times. Are artificial systems, such as LLMs, subject to the same principles? Or are they different in important ways from biological systems.

We draw on neural network modeling, information-theory and experimental work to better understand how both humans and machines efficiently make sense of the world in some cases, but not others.

We are located in Winifred Raven House, rooms 104 & 106. For more information on undergraduate research opportunities, graduate or post-doctoral training, please contact Steven Frankland.

Steven Frankland, an assistant professor in cognitive science and ARIA (AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants), co-investigator, who will coordinate the basic cognitive science research and computational modeling conducted at Dartmouth. His Mind, Brain, and Computation Lab focuses on the computational mechanisms underlying the cognitive flexibility necessary to build more adaptive and sympathetic AI systems.