Jack Gallant

Dr. Catherine Chen's study of semantic relations has been accepted in Nature Human Behaviour! fMRI encoding models across 1000+ concept pairs show that relations and concepts share cortical regions, with most voxels selective for a single relation. Read the preprint. gallantlab.org

Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience! Encoding models fit 28,134 features to fMRI from a virtual taxi-driving task, revealing 11 distinct cortical regions that transform perception into action. Read the preprint. gallantlab.org

New paper from Dr. Tianjiao Zhang accepted in eNeuro: comparing semantic representations during passive movie watching to those measured during naturalistic navigation. Attention in different task contexts alters semantic representations to optimize task performance. gallantlab.org

Here's my favorite science quote from this year! “…several questions remain about the potential role of the liver in navigation.” www.science.org/content/arti...

We've posted a new group-based lexical-semantic brain viewer! You can now inspect cortical conceptual maps at the group level (24 participants), vertex-by-vertex. Check it out! gallantlab.org/viewer-stori...

Our postdoc Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has released "Its Complicated", a great software library that provides infrastructure to implement naturalistic, complex, interactive experiments in game engines. The toolbox supports peripherals and coding game logic for later analysis. gallantlab.org/Its-Complica...

Check out this great new paper by @alexanderhuth.bsky.social and Jerry Tang, "Rapid cortical mapping with cross-participant encoding models". The paper develops a new framework for using cross-participant encoding models to improve modeling of new participants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Pycortex, our awesome brain viewer software, has a major new feature! Thanks to the hard work of Dr. Matteo Visconti and Aditya Vaidya, Pycortex now supports headless webgl viewers! You can create 3D inflated plots without needing a display, and in Jupyter notebooks! gallantlab.org/pycortex/aut...

We've posted a new fMRI study examining attention across tasks. We compare semantic representations during movie watching to those during naturalistic navigation. We show that attention in different contexts alters semantic representations to optimize performance. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our bilingualism paper is now published in PNAS. We used fMRI to compare semantic brain representations in English-Chinese bilinguals. Semantic representations are largely shared across languages, but finer-grained differences modulate how meaning is represented. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Voxelwise Encoding Models do some things differently from other GLM-related methods because the roots of VEM are in neurophysiology, not psychology. This 2006 paper describes system identification for neurophysiology. Change "neurons" to "voxels" and it all still applies. tinyurl.com/wu-etal-2006

A recent paper made big waves arguing that fMRI data are hopelessly confounded and uninterpretable. But I'm always suspicious of strong claims that go against a large body of well-supported science. This important post by @alexanderhuth.bsky.social suggests that the paper is fundamentally flawed.