Troland Research Award

Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) and to further empirical research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.

Evelina Fedorenko, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Nicholas Turk-Browne, Yale University, will each receive a 2025 Troland Research Award.

Fedorenko’s groundbreaking contributions have advanced understanding of the language network in the human brain and its relationship with other brain networks.

Fedorenko investigates how people understand and produce language. Her novel methods combine precise measures of an individual’s brain organization with innovative computational modeling to make fundamental discoveries about the computations that underlie the uniquely human ability for language.

Fedorenko has shown that the language network is selective for language processing over diverse non-linguistic processes that have been argued to share computational demands with language, such as arithmetic processing, music, and social reasoning. Her work has also demonstrated that syntactic processing is not localized to a particular region within the language network, and every brain region that responds to syntactic processing is at least as sensitive to word meanings; and that representations from neural network language models, such as ChatGPT, are similar to those in the human language brain areas.

Turk-Browne’s innovative research on human learning and memory has transformed our understanding of the function and development of brain systems that support cognition.

Turk-Browne’s work offers an integrative perspective on human cognition, revealing how perception and attention influence what we remember, and how statistical learning of patterns over time allows us to make predictions and perform better. He derives these and other insights with state-of-the-art studies of behavior, brain imaging, brain implants, and computational models, including groundbreaking functional magnetic resonance imaging of awake infants and toddlers to discover how they learn so much yet remember so little.

Fedorenko and Turk-Browne will be honored in a ceremony on Sunday, April 27 during the National Academy of Sciences’ 162nd annual meeting. The ceremony will be livestreamed.