Prasanna Vijayaraghavan
Post-doctoral Fellow, McMaster University · Brodbeck Lab
How does a stream of sound become language in the brain? I’m a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Christian Brodbeck’s lab at McMaster University, where I use MEG recordings and computational models to trace how the human brain turns speech into meaning.
Selected publications
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2025Vijayaraghavan, P., Queißer, J. F., Flores, S. V., & Tani, J. (2025). Development of compositionality through interactive learning of language and action of robots. Science Robotics, 10.
@article{vijayaraghavan2025compositionality, title = {Development of compositionality through interactive learning of language and action of robots}, author = {Vijayaraghavan, Prasanna and Quei{\ss}er, Jeffrey Frederic and Flores, Sergio Verduzco and Tani, Jun}, journal = {Science Robotics}, volume = {10}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.1126/scirobotics.adp0751} }
About me
I’m fascinated by how minds, biological and artificial, come to understand language. My path here has crossed several fields: from biotechnology and metabolic neuroscience, to cognitive science, to a PhD in cognitive robotics at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. There, I built brain-inspired neural networks that let robots learn words and actions together, and showed how they can combine familiar concepts in new ways (Science Robotics, 2025).
Today I bring that computational lens to the human brain. By modelling how the brain responds, moment by moment, to natural speech, I study how we pick out words and build meaning in real time.
My full publication record is on Google Scholar.
Prasanna Vijayaraghavan
Post-doctoral Fellow
McMaster University
Brodbeck Lab
- (2024) PhD in Cognitive Robotics
- (2014) MS in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience
- (2012) BTech in Biotechnology