The Quest for Intelligence supported eight research projects in neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning over the 2024-2025 academic year through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). This year’s Quest UROPs study widely varied areas at both MIT and Wellesley College, including mathematics, computer science, studio art, linguistics and more, and worked on projects across the Quest’s Missions and Platforms. Collaboration across disciplines is a cornerstone of Quest research, and UROPs are encouraged to explore unfamiliar areas both in and beyond their claimed major.
Several UROPs worked with Quest researchers on the growing Brain-Score platform, applying research on brain-model architectures towards improving the platform’s front-end development and expanding Brain-Score’s capabilities for the researchers who utilize it to analyze neural data. Others worked with the Language Mission in Professor Ev Fedorenko’s lab, using large language models to understand the neural representations underlying language in the human brain and how those representations change as the brain develops in childhood and beyond. One student researching with Professor Nancy Kanwisher under the Embodied Intelligence Mission studied the Physics Network of the brain, which governs physical judgement tasks and predictions, to determine the role of audio stimuli in physical understanding. Another Kanwisher student used the UROP term to create a virtual reality simulation of throwing and catching a ball towards an understanding of how everyday actions are planned in the brain and how different computational techniques catch the ball in the same simulation conditions.
Read the project descriptions from each of this year’s Quest UROPs here.