Simons Center for the Social Brain

SCSB Lunch Series with Dr. Marvin Lavechin: Small babies, big data: decoding early vocalizations with speech technology
2025-11-14 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | Simons Center Conference Room, Bldg. 46, Room 6011, 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Date: Friday, November 14, 2025
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/98894785862]
Speaker: Marvin Lavechin, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Computational Psycholinguistics Lab, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Talk title: Small babies, big data: decoding early vocalizations with speech technology
Abstract: Babbling is a critical milestone during which infants explore moving their articulators to produce increasingly complex sounds before producing their first words around 12 months. As of today, studying vocal development requires the costly and labor-intensive process of manually transcribing children’s linguistic productions, which often limits research to small sample sizes. In this talk, I’ll present my ongoing efforts to build a fully automated speech processing pipeline to enable large-scale studies of vocal development from naturalistic day-long recordings. The talk follows three stages of inquiry. First, detecting when children vocalize – a prerequisite for studying what they say (past work). Second, characterizing the sounds they produce (current work). Third, measuring when language-specificity emerges in their vocalizations (future work). With this pipeline, I hope to address two long-standing questions: To what extent do individuals follow shared trajectories in phonological development? And when do infants start exhibiting distinct babbling patterns across different languages? Beyond theoretical implications, these insights will also allow investigation of early vocal markers associated with atypical language development.

SCSB Lunch Series with Dr. Haoran Xu and Dr. Beizhen Zhang - Investigating Neural Circuit Abnormalities in SHANK3 Mutant Marmosets
2025-12-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Simons Center Conference Room, Bldg. 46, Room 6011, 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Date: Friday, December 5, 2025
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/95992863075]
Speakers: Haoran Xu, Ph.D., Research Scientist & Beizhen Zhang, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow
Affiliation: Desimone Lab, McGovern Institute, MIT
Talk title: Investigating Neural Circuit Abnormalities in SHANK3 Mutant Marmosets
Abstract: Phelan-McDermid Syndrome (PMS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder caused by mutations or deletions in the SHANK3 gene, a key component for maintaining synaptic structure and neural circuit integrity. Individuals with PMS exhibit profound social communication deficits, intellectual disability, and sensory abnormalities, yet the neural circuit mechanisms underlying these symptoms remain elusive. In this talk, I will present our ongoing work using SHANK3 mutant marmosets as a primate model to probe these circuit dysfunctions. We implanted four 64-channel ECoG arrays across temporal and prefrontal regions in mutant and wild-type animals and examined their neural dynamics during social perception, cognitive, and auditory tasks. Despite showing normal gaze patterns while viewing faces or movies, SHANK3 mutants exhibited reduced high-gamma activity in face-selective regions and weakened social representations in both the prefrontal (PFC) and inferotemporal (IT) cortices. During working memory tasks, mutants performed more poorly, with their deficits linked to elevated alpha and high-gamma power in the PFC during the delay period. In the auditory domain, they showed hypoactivity in auditory cortical areas but paradoxical hyper-responsivity to noise-like sounds in the PFC and visual regions, suggesting impaired inhibition. Together, these findings reveal how SHANK3 disruption alters distributed neural circuits underlying social, cognitive, and sensory processing, offering a window into the circuit-level basis of PMS and related neurodevelopmental disorders.

SCSB Colloquium Series: Vikaas Sohal, M.D., Ph.D.
2025-12-10 16:00 - 17:00 | Singleton Auditorium, Bldg. 46, Room 3002, 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium)
Speaker: Vikaas Sohal, M.D., Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Institute for Neurosciences, University of California San Francisco
Host: Dr. Linlin Fan
Talk title and abstract to be provided later….

SCSB Lunch Series: Dr. Jen Yong
2026-02-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Simons Center Conference Room, Bldg. 46, Room 6011, 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Date: Friday, February 13, 2026
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/98419153925]
Speaker: Jen Yong, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Huh Lab, Harvard Medical School
Talk title and abstract to be provided later…

SCSB Colloquium Series: Dr. Catherine Lord
2026-04-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Singleton Auditorium, Bldg. 46, Room 3002, 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium)
Speaker: Catherine Lord, Ph.D.
Affiliation: George Tarjan Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Education, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles
Host: Dr. Mriganka Sur
Talk title and abstract to be provided later….
