Literary critics, neuroscientists, and AI theorists from eminent institutions across the country gathered at Claremont McKenna College for “Predicting Feeling: Literature, Neuroscience and AI,” a day-long interdisciplinary conference meant to showcase and create conversations at the intersection of three disciplines that can each be deployed to predict the complexities of human feeling.
CMC Professor Radhika Koul, whose own scholarly work connects contemporary research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence with the age-old study of how literature works on the human mind, organized the Feb. 21 conference.
Opening the conference, which was sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Professor Derik Smith, chair of the Literature department at CMC, welcomed all the participants and congratulated Professor Koul for facilitating new avenues for interdisciplinary literary research at the 5Cs.
Koul’s talk, Why Literature, Neuroscience and AI? shared the rationale and motivation for such interdisciplinary work, which depends on recent strides at each of the three intersections implied in the name of the conference: literature and AI, neuroscience and AI, and literature and neuroscience. Many of those experts who had been influential in demonstrating these intersections were guest speakers at the conference, which boasted a prestigious line-up including:
- Uri Hasson, Princeton University: Deep Language Models as a Cognitive Model for Natural Language Processing in the Human Brain;
- Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut: Emotion Elicitation, Prediction, and Anti-Universalism: Some Prolegomena to Emotional AI;
- Natalie M. Philips, Michigan State University: Patterns of Feeling: Moving toward Real-Time Measures of Attention and Affect in Literary Reading;
- Jay McClelland, Stanford University: Distributed multiplexed representations and graded interacting constraints in cognition and affect;
- Joshua Landy, Stanford University: Literary Narrative and the Temporality of Emotions; and
- CMC Professor Alison Harris: Viewing vs. Doing: Perception and Embodiment in our Understanding of Emotional Body Movements
Koul’s talk described how “with recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, scholars now have unprecedented access into the human brain” while “reading and writing literature have always been predicated on beliefs and assumptions about how literature plays with the human mind.” In response, Joshua Landy (Stanford) and Natalie Philips (Michigan State University) discussed research demonstrating just how different genres of literature modulate attention and affect over time.
Uri Hasson from Princeton University and Jay McClelland from Stanford, two of the most eminent cognitive scientists in the country, gave talks on the intersections between natural and human intelligence, in particular the shared computational principles that might underlie both kinds of intelligence, especially concerning their manifestations in linguistic ability.
These talks raised questions regarding universalism and cultural relativism, which literatures and other cultural media have contended with over time. Patrick Hogan (University of Connecticut) focused his talk on the valences of this question, and CMC’s Allison Harris shared some of her lab’s research on the embodiment of human emotion and the perception of such embodied emotions, areas that current AI literature tends to ignore.
A highlight of the conference was the involvement of 5C students in both the research and organizational aspects of the conference. Professor Koul mentored three of her students from her “Literature and the Brain” course, taught in Fall 2023 and Fall 2024, in preparing and delivering research presentations of their own.
Yuchen Liu ’24, who graduated with a degree in Psychology and Data Science, gave a talk on “Vividness in Literary Narratives,” with an insightful reading of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Antara Krishnan HMC ’27, a Physics major and Art minor, gave a talk on “Neural and Narrative Time in Nonlinear Storytelling.” Chisato Kamakura ’27, studying Neuroscience with a Data Science sequence, gave a talk, “Through the Pages: How Children’s Literature Reflects Differences in Ideal Affect,” focusing on the differences in Japanese and American children’s literature.
Ellen Ketels, Associate Dean of the Faculty for Curriculum and an Associate Professor of Literature at CMC, said the conference encouraged her to feel reinvigorated about her own research, and “provided an opportunity to think about what it is that we do best in a liberal arts college, when we cross disciplines, and take time together.”
Jason Bao ’27, who is majoring in Psychology and Philosophy with a Data Science Sequence, assisted Professor Koul with the conference logistics. Bao said he appreciated Koul’s interdisciplinary approach to curating the conference, and for the opportunity to “hear from a range of speakers who tackled the same issues of ‘predicting feeling’ in such a diverse way.”
The conference ended with an open session in which students, faculty and guest speakers engaged in spirited conversation on questions raised by the talks, ranging from the nature of consciousness to the limits of human language.
Professors Zeynep Enkavi (KDIS, Neuroscience), Amanda Johnson (Pitzer, English) and Yuqing Zhu (Pomona, Neuroscience) helped moderate the conference.