How the brain works in real life, not just in a lab experiment.

1. 

   Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience!

   September 23, 2026

   The paper has not yet appeared in print but you can find a preprint here.

   Briefly, participants performed a taxi driver task in a large virtual world. Voxelwise encoding models were used to fit 38 different feature spaces (comprising an astounding 28,134 distinct features) to the data. Results show that naturalistic navigation is supported by a network of 11 functionally distinct cortical regions that operate together to transform perceptual inputs through decision-making processes to produce action outputs. This paper really pushes the boundaries of what is possible in fMRI, no one has ever done anything at this scale before.

2. 

   Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has a new paper accepted in eNeuro.

   September 16, 2026

   Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has a new paper accepted in eNeuro.

   This study compares semantic representations during passive movie watching to those measured during naturalistic navigation. The results show that attention in different task contexts alters semantic representations to optimize task performance.

3. 

   We've released SharpEyes, an application for eyetracking and motion-energy features...

   July 13, 2026

   We’ve released SharpEyes, a desktop application for eyetracking and for building motion-energy features out of stimulus videos.

   It finds the pupil in every frame of an eyetracking video, lets you hand-correct the gaze overlaid on the stimulus, recenters the stimulus on gaze to produce a retinotopic video, and computes motion-energy features — all without touching Python. Precompiled Windows and Linux builds are on the releases page.

   Thanks to Dr. Tianjiao Zhang for developing this tool!

4. 

   Pycortex, our awesome brain viewer software, has another new feature: in-browser ROI drawing...

   June 25, 2026

   Pycortex, our awesome brain viewer software, has another new feature!

   You can now draw regions of interest directly in any pycortex WebGL brain viewer. Switch to Draw mode, lasso an area on the flattened cortical surface, and the stroke is fitted to a smooth, editable outline that you can name, export to JSON, and re-import across viewers. The drawing tool ships as a single self-contained script — pycortex-roidraw — that can be dropped into any pycortex viewer. Try it out in our updated group-based language comprehension semantic map viewer.

5. 

   We've released the Literature Review Toolkit, scaffolding that drives an LLM agent through a structured literature review — and keeps it honest...

   June 24, 2026

   We’ve released the Literature Review Toolkit, scaffolding that drives a Claude (or other LLM) agent through a structured literature review — and keeps it honest.

   It verifies every citation against PubMed, PMC, CrossRef, and arXiv, canonicalizes references into APA-7 format, and produces a verified annotated bibliography along with interactive lineage figures that place theoretical families on a citation-weighted timeline.

6. 

   We've made a new interactive figure that maps the lab's research onto the major themes of the field...

   June 12, 2026

   We’ve made The Gallant Lab in context, an interactive figure that maps the lab’s research onto the major themes of the broader field.

   You can find it on our Learn page.

Browse the full news archive →