Cognitive · systems · computational neuroscience
How the human brain makes sense of the natural world.
Our laboratory at UC Berkeley uses naturalistic experiments — long movies, audio stories, video games — to record the brain in action, then builds voxel-wise computational models that map how meaning, attention, and behavior are distributed across the cerebral cortex.
Viewer Spotlight
Today on the cortex: where meaning lives.
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. Open in full screen ↗
Recent news
We've released It's Complicated, a software library that provides critical infrastructure required...
March 30, 2026
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!
Pycortex, our awesome brain viewer software, has a major new feature
March 23, 2026
Pycortex, our awesome brain viewer software, has a major new feature!
Thanks to the hard work of Dr. Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello and Aditya Vaidya, Pycortex now supports headless WebGL viewers! You can create 3D inflated plots without needing a display, and in Jupyter notebooks! See the documentation here.
Dr. Catherine Chen has a new paper accepted at PNAS
February 24, 2026
Dr. Catherine Chen has a new paper accepted at PNAS.
This study used fMRI to compare semantic brain representations in English-Chinese bilinguals reading natural narratives in each language. Semantic representations are largely shared across languages, but finer-grained differences systematically modulate how meaning is represented.
Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has uploaded a new study of attention as a...
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.
Dr. Catherine Chen has uploaded a new study of semantic representation as...
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.
Dr. Jiwoong Park Joins the Lab
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!
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 ↗