UC Irvine School of Social Sciences | New faculty interview: Anna Leshinskaya

Assistant Professor, Cognitive Sciences | Ph.D. Harvard University

Research interests: learning, relational reasoning, computational cognitive neuroscience, semantic memory, artificial intelligence alignment/interpretability

Anna Leshinskaya, UCI cognitive sciences assistant professor, studies the neural organization of conceptual knowledge and learning pathways that help us build episodic and semantic memory. Her work intersects important topics in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. As a new member of the UCI faculty, she’ll be opening the Relational Cognition Lab where she will lead research on how we transform sensory experiences into abstract, relationally structured knowledge, and how this is made possible by the brain. She’s also deeply interested in the ways in which AI can benefit from the tools of cognitive science.

“Some of the issues we face in society today are how to understand and trust new rapidly developing neural networks, notably large language models,” she says. “Abilities that are deeply relational, like causal and moral reasoning, are some of the most fascinating and important topics to study in the emerging fields of AI, alignment and interpretability.”

Her previous work, supported by the National Science Foundation and John Templeton Foundation, has been published in journals such as Cerebral Cortex, Neuroscience and Philosophy, Cognition, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and others.

Leshinskaya earned her Ph.D. in psychology – cognition, brain and behavior from Harvard University. Past professional posts have included postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Neuroscience at UC Davis where she also served as an assistant project scientist before joining the AI Objectives Institute in San Francisco as a research lead in human cognition and AI. She’s looking forward to participating in the world class research happening within the Department of Cognitive Sciences and UCI’s centers and institutes that focus on the mind, brain and AI.