CDRNN: Discovering Complex Dynamics in Human Language Processing

The human mind is a dynamical system, yet many analysis techniques used to study it are limited in their ability to capture the complex dynamics that may characterize mental processes. This study proposes the continuous-time deconvolutional regressive neural network (CDRNN), a deep neural extension of continuous-time deconvolutional regression (Shain & Schuler, 2021) that jointly captures time-varying, non-linear, and delayed influences of predictors (e.g. word surprisal) on the response (e.g. reading time). Despite this flexibility, CDRNN is interpretable and able to illuminate patterns in human cognition that are otherwise difficult to study. Behavioral and fMRI experiments reveal detailed and plausible estimates of human language processing dynamics that generalize better than CDR and other baselines, supporting a potential role for CDRNN in studying human language processing.