The Cognition Project
From Wugs to Chatbots: Jean Berko Gleason
27 February 2026 1:02:00 Tom Griffiths
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About this episode
The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.
This episode is the story of Jean Berko Gleason, who was a student at Harvard just as new ideas about studying language and the mind were emerging. Her work revealed that even young children seem to internalize the rules of language, an idea that we are going to revisit when artificial neural networks come into the story. Those artificial neural networks power today’s AI chatbots, but Berko Gleason remains skeptical.
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