This site provides information about ongoing research in Jack Gallant’s cognitive, systems and computational neuroscience lab at UC Berkeley. Here you can find our cool interactive brain viewers, some of our published papers, information about the great people who do the work, our open data, open source code, and tutorials.
If you would like to know more about the general philosophy of the lab, please listen to this Freakonomics podcast interview with Jack Gallant or to these OHBM discussions between Peter Bandettini and Jack Gallant (discussion 1, discussion 2). If you would like to know more about our cutting-edge fMRI data analysis and modeling framework, voxelwise encoding models, please navigate to the Learn page.
Latest News
February 22, 2026
Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has uploaded a new study of attention as a
preprint on BioRxiv. 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.
February 22, 2026
Dr. Catherine Chen has uploaded a new study of semantic representation as a
preprint on BioRxiv. This study focuses on semantic relations (e.g., has-part, larger-than, and so on). She finds that semantic relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one specific relation.
February 4, 2026
Dr. Jiwoong Park has joined our lab as a Postdoc! Jiwoong received his PhD from SungKyunKwan University in Korea, where he worked in the lab of a close collaborator, Prof. Won-Mok Shim. Welcome aboard Jiwoong!
January 28, 2026
Yashaswini, graduate student in EECS, has joined our lab! She will be co-advised by Prof. Gopala Anumanchipalli. Welcome aboard Yashaswini!
December 17, 2025
Our awesome postdoc
Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has uploaded his Naturalistic Navigation study as a
preprint on bioRxiv. 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.
December 15, 2025
We've released
Autoflatten, a Python pipeline for automatically flattening cortical surfaces generated by FreeSurfer. Prior to the development of this pipeline flattening was done largely by hand, an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating process. This new pipeline automates most of the work. Thanks to
Dr. Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello for this great new tool!
December 14, 2025
Alicia Zeng has received her PhD! Congratulations Dr. Zeng! Alicia will be doing a short postdoc in our lab, continuing the work that she started as a graduate student.
Find older news items here.
