Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

Elan Barenholtz, Ph.D.

Founder and Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI)
Associate Professor

# Contact Information

Department of Psychology
Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences
Center for the Future Mind
777 Glades Road
Boca Raton, FL 33431-0991
Behavioral Sciences (BS-12), Room 212
[email protected]

# Positions

  • Associate Professor of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University
  • Co-Founder & Co-Principal Investigator, Machine Perception and Cognitive Robotics (MPCR) Laboratory
  • Associate Director, Center for the Future Mind

# Education

  • Ph.D., Experimental Psychology & Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
  • M.A., Rutgers University, New Brunswick
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University

# Research Interests

  • Foundations of language and cognition
  • Deep learning and large language models
  • Embedded computational neural models
  • Perception, learning, and object recognition

# Research Description

I use behavioral and embedded computational approaches — neural networks running in robots — to study the brain and behavior, with the goal of developing a broad theoretical framework of neural function. Trained as an experimental psychologist, I began my career investigating human visual perception and object recognition. Over the past decade my work has increasingly turned to artificial intelligence, both as a tool for understanding the brain and as a subject of study in its own right.

# The Generative Brain

My current research develops the idea that language is an autonomous, autoregressive system — one that generates coherent continuations from its own internal structure rather than by describing an external world. This framework reframes memory, imagination, and the sense of self as products of sequential generation rather than storage and retrieval, and asks how far human cognition can be explained by the same principle that drives modern large language models. I write about these ideas for a general audience in my newsletter, The Generative Brain.

# Scholarly Service

  • Reviewer, National Science Foundation review panels
  • Editorial Board Member, Frontiers in Psychology

# Publications

Google Scholar profile

# Slideshow

Projects

Publications