A rat commits to a choice. A macaque commits to a choice. A language model produces a token. Whether those are the same kind of event is an empirical question, and it is answerable.

This session walks through a cross-substrate comparison of decision dynamics: what has to be held constant for the comparison to mean anything, why the obvious way to run it produces a confound that looks like a finding, and what has to be fixed in advance to keep the analysis honest.

Attendees leave able to read cross-system claims about AI and cognition critically, including the specific confounds that make most such comparisons unreliable.

intermediate · 45 min