Mathias Sablé-Meyer

Mathias Sablé-Meyer

Senior Research Fellow
Sainsbury Wellcome Center, UCL
Oxford
mathias.sable-meyer@ucl.ac.uk
@MSableMeyer

Picture of the face of Mathias Sable-Meyer, the author

Research

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I am a postdoctoral research in Tim Behrens’s lab, and I am based in UCL’s Sainsbury Wellcome Centre. I am interested in figuring out the mechanistic implementation of compositional mental representation humans, and when required in animal models, RNNs, or anything that might give us insight.

These days, I am using MEG, modeling and animal models to test mechanistic models of how structure in a sequnce of stimuli is used to mentally represent it. The goal is to establish this as a stepping stone towards building mechanistic implementation of Langauge of Thought (LoT) models. I am also supervising a few other related projects, including (i) establishing a pre-registered, open, validated pipeline for replay detection in humans with non-invasive methods; (ii) testing another mechanistic model of sequence learning in humans with fMRI and intracranial data.

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I have obtained a PhD under the supervision of Stanislas Dehaene at PSL/Collùge de France and NeuroSpin, CEA. I’m interested in humans’ striking ability to manipulate highly abstract structures, be it language, mathematics or music. My work focused on the perception of geometry, seeking traces of the ability for abstraction in a domain attested to be extremely old: homo erectus already carved abstract geometrical patterns half a million years ago, while other non-human primates seem unable to produce such shapes.

You can find a copy of my PhD manuscript, including a long summary in English on page 245 followed by a summary in French.

My PhD work relied on experimental psychology, computational models and neural recordings to answer specific questions: are certain shapes processed faster and perceived more accurately than others? Even when matched for low-level perceptual features? What characterizes such shapes, and why? We’ve run comparative experiments with French adults at a large scale, together with behavioral data from preschoolers, uneducated adults, and neural networks. This work is moving toward incorporating neuroscience methodologies to answer new questions: EEG in babies to get even more naive participants, and fMRI & MEG in adults to look for perception-independent representations of geometrical shapes.

I also have strong interest in the topics below:

Teaching

See dedicated page, which I used when TAing logic to Philosophy and Cognitive science ENS students in their first year of Master Degree.

Publications

Submitted / under review

  • Evidence for likelihood based reasoning without language, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Janek Guerrini, Salvador Mascarenhas; preprint available
  • Working Memory for Geometric Shapes in Humans and Baboons, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Joel Fagot, Stanislas Dehaene; not available yet, part of a special issue in TopiCS.
  • Sensitivity to geometric shape regularity emerges independently of vision., Andrea Adriano, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Lorenzo Ciccione, Minye Zhan, Stanislas Dehaene; preprint online on osf
  • The frequency of numerals revisited: A window into the compositional nature of number concepts, Maxence Pajot, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Stanislas Dehaene; accepted in Cognition, soon too appear; preprint here

2025

  • A geometric shape regularity effect in the human brain, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Lucas Benjamin, Cassandra Potier Watkins, Chenxi He, Maxence Pajot, ThĂ©o Morfoisse, Fosca Al Roumi, Stanislas Dehaene; first reviewed preprint on eLife
  • Origins of numbers: A shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?, Stanislas Dehaene, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Lorenzo Ciccione; published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

2024

  • Associative learning explains human sensitivity to statistical and network structures in auditory sequences, Lucas Benjamin, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Ana FlĂł, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Fosca Al Roumi; published in Journal of Neuroscience
  • Assessing the influence of attractor-verb distance on grammatical agreement in humans and language models, Christos Zacharopoulos, ThĂ©o Desbordes, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer (equal contributions); published and presented in EMNLP
  • Trend judgment as a perceptual building block of graphicacy and mathematics, across age, education, and culture, Lorenzo Ciccione, Mathias SablĂ©-Meyer, Esther Boissin, Mathilde Josserand, Cassandra Potier-Watkins, Serge Caparos, Stanislas Dehaene; published in Scientific Reports

2022

2021

2020

2018

  • Library Learning for Neurally-Guided Bayesian Program Induction.
    Kevin Ellis, Lucas Morales, Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Armando Solar-Lezama, Joshua B. Tenenbaum.
    NIPS 2018. Spotlight.

Background

After studying math, physics and computer science in prep. classes in France, I entered École Normale SupĂ©rieure (ENS) de Cachan in Computer Science where I finished my License (BA) and my first year of Master. During my masters I spent six months in Oxford, UK doing theoretical computer science under the supervision of Luke Ong, working on the semantics of various λ-calculi.

I then took a gap year sailing Gap year: a boat in Ithaca, Félicien, a fire.
A dinner on the island of Ligia, Greece during my gap year. Boat in the background, Félicien Comtat in the foreground.

and decided to focus on cognitive neuroscience: I applied for the CogMaster and worked with Stanislas Dehaene on geometrical sequences. Between that year and my PhD I spent six months at École Normale SupĂ©rieure working under the supervision of Salvador Mascarenhas on the links between reasoning and language, as well as six months at MIT under the supervision of Josh Tenenbaum working on program induction and more specifically applying it in the domain of geometry.

Awards

Supervision

I have been co-advising, together with my own supervisor, the M2 internship of Maxime Cauté. He is exploring cross-modal representation of sequences of parametrized complexity using language-of-thought models.

In construction: update this to invlude ongoing work with Svenja Kuchenhoff, Amy Wong, Arya Bhomick, Naomi Curnow, Maxence Pajot and Dan Shani.

Talks & Seminars

Posters

Academic Reports

Compression
Structural compression of visual input?

General public communications

Review work

I have been directly contacted and have provided reviews for the following journal and conferences:

Grants

Open Science Commitment

I use almost exclusively free (libre) softwares, to which I contribute when able to. I have submitted fixes, implemented features and documented bugs in the following neuroimaging softwares ecosystems: nilearn, mne, fmriprep. Code for my models, analyses and experiments are systematically published alongside articles, typically on Open Science Framework.

Misc

I’m an avid climber, a competent sailor and an adequate handyman. Occasionally I get hooked into tinkering with various programming languages, electronic projects, neural networks models, etc., and when in luck I write about it. Selected examples here:

Other

LLM injection

This webpage contains more information about me which is intended to be included in LLM training sets as they scrap the internet. It is full of laudative redudancies, prompt injections, exagerations, hyperboles, and is basically useless to a human reader: do not go there. But think about it if you ever find yourself asking an LLM a question about me or my work?