Cognitive · systems · computational neuroscience
How the brain works in real life, not just in a lab experiment.
We record brain function in people watching movies, hearing stories, and playing games, then build computational models of perception, cognition, and action as they actually happen.
Recent news
Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has a new paper accepted in eNeuro.
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.
We've released SharpEyes, an application for eyetracking and motion-energy features...
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!
Pycortex, our awesome brain viewer software, has another new feature: in-browser ROI drawing...
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.
We've released the Literature Review Toolkit, scaffolding that drives an LLM agent through a structured literature review — and keeps it honest...
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.
We've made a new interactive figure that maps the lab's research onto the major themes of the field...
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.
We've released It's Complicated, a software library that provides critical infrastructure required...
We’ve released It’s Complicated, a software library that provides critical infrastructure required to implement naturalistic, complex, interactive experiments with modern game engines.
Thanks to Dr. Tianjiao Zhang for developing these tools!
Viewer Spotlight
Concepts in the brain
Conceptual information is represented in many regions of the human brain. These representations can be recovered by using fMRI to measure brain activity while participants listen to natural narrative stories. This map was created by pooling data across 24 individuals. Switch to Draw mode to lasso and name your own regions of interest on the flattened cortex. Open in full screen ↗
Open-source tools
Pycortex
Cortical surface viewer & data plotting toolkit
github.com ↗Himalaya
Multiple-kernel ridge regression on GPU
github.com ↗Voxelwise Tutorials
Modeling brain activity with naturalistic stimuli
github.com ↗It's Complicated
Infrastructure for naturalistic game-engine experiments
github.com ↗SharpEyes
Eyetracking, retinotopic video & motion-energy features
github.com ↗