Neural Dynamics Lab, Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Zurich

Excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications! 🎉 Recording neurons in human temporal cortex, we found that speech sounds and word meaning are both encoded in neural manifolds, and that speech sounds line up in time with word meaning, a signature of top-down prediction. 🧵

This was a team effort led by Pavo Orepić @pavoorepic.bsky.social, with Wilson Truccolo, Eric Halgren, Sydney Cash, Anne-Lise Giraud @annelisegiraud.bsky.social, and Timothée Proix. Our deepest thanks go to the participants, and to the reviewers who helped us improve the paper!

Excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications! 🎉 Recording neurons in human temporal cortex, we found that speech sounds and word meaning are both encoded in neural manifolds, and that speech sounds line up in time with word meaning, a signature of top-down prediction. 🧵

We found a top-down alignment in this anterior superior temporal gyrus area: the representation for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd... phoneme peaks at the same moment as the meaning, at a fixed delay after the word starts.

Excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications! 🎉 Recording neurons in human temporal cortex, we found that speech sounds and word meaning are both encoded in neural manifolds, and that speech sounds line up in time with word meaning, a signature of top-down prediction. 🧵

These results were reproduced during natural conversation, with a different speaker and different recorded neurons. The manifold stays stable even when the individual neurons change.

Excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications! 🎉 Recording neurons in human temporal cortex, we found that speech sounds and word meaning are both encoded in neural manifolds, and that speech sounds line up in time with word meaning, a signature of top-down prediction. 🧵

Only a few single neurons responded clearly when taken in isolation, and nearby ECoG did not show any specific response. The information actually lies in the neural population: its activity unfolds in a low-dimensional neural manifold, where phonemes trace paths grouped by phonetic categories.

Excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications! 🎉 Recording neurons in human temporal cortex, we found that speech sounds and word meaning are both encoded in neural manifolds, and that speech sounds line up in time with word meaning, a signature of top-down prediction. 🧵

Speech is often described as a progression from sounds to meaning. But meaning also changes what we hear, e.g. the surrounding word can change how we hear an ambiguous sound. Where and how do these two levels meet in the brain?

Exciting new preprint from our lab! We find evidence that the human medial temporal lobe encodes letter pairs using a distinct population of neurons, separate from those encoding individual letters. doi.org/10.64898/202...

📢 After many years of work, our new paper with Sophie Bouton, Anne-lise Giraud, Elia Formisano, Valerian Chambon and Narly Golestani is finally out: Aligning Statistical Models with Inference Goals doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

📌 Our work introduces a Dual-Dependency Taxonomy that clarifies how modelling choices shape inferences drawn from neural and linguistic data. We show how different dependency assumptions influence what conclusions are valid and provide guidance for choosing models that align with inference goals.