News

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!

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.

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 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 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 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!

Yashaswini, graduate student in EECS, has joined our lab! She will be co-advised by Prof. Gopala Anumanchipalli. Welcome aboard Yashaswini!

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.

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!

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.

Amanda LeBel has received her PhD! Congratulations Dr. LeBel! Amanda will be starting a postdoc in the lab of Prof. Anila D’Mello at UT Southwestern and UT Dallas early next year.

Fantastic news! Our former postdoc Prof. Fatma Deniz has just been elected President of the Technical University of Berlin! Congratulations President Deniz!

This new NeurIPS paper from Alicia Zeng presents an important new method for improving interpretation of neuroimaging experiments that use word embeddings as features.

Our latest review paper on the Voxelwise Encoding Model (VEM) framework from Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello and Fatma Deniz is now available as a preprint on PsyArXiv.

This paper provides the first comprehensive guide for creating encoding models with fMRI data, and complements our VEM tutorials.

We have created a new brain viewer that provides a way to inspect cortical visual-semantic conceptual maps at the group level, vertex-by-vertex.

The data for this viewer were generated by pooling visual semantic maps from 15 separate participants who viewed several hours of short movie clips.

We’ve created a new brain viewer that provides a way to inspect cortical lexical-semantic conceptual maps at the group level, vertex-by-vertex.

The data for this viewer were generated by pooling lexical semantic maps from 24 separate participants who listened to several hours of natural narrative stories. Based on the results that we reported in another recent paper, this viewer should account for about 80% of the variance in lexical semantic conceptual maps in any individual.

Here is an amazing new paper on individual differences from Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello.

This paper solves a longstanding problem in fMRI that has profound implications for precision medicine. The paper is currently posted on bioRxiv and it is in review.

Emily Meschke has received her PhD!

Congratulations Dr. Meschke! Emily will be moving to Columbia University in a few months to begin a postdoc.

We’ve published a new tutorial paper from Tom Dupré la Tour on the Voxelwise Encoding Model framework, published in Imaging Neuroscience.

Dr. Evi Hendrikx has joined our lab as our newest postdoc!

It’s great to have you on board Evi!

New paper from Gong et al. on phonemic segmentation of narrative speech in human cerebral cortex, published in Nature Communications.

Catherine Chen has received her PhD!

Congratulations Dr. Chen! Catherine will be moving to Princeton University to do a short postdoc, and then she will join the technology industry.

Fatma Deniz has accepted a full Professor position at Technical University of Berlin as of April 1, 2023.

Congratulations to Fatma on this exciting new chapter!

New preprint from Meschke et al. comparing functional connectivity and model connectivity methods, titled “Model connectivity: leveraging the power of encoding models”.

New paper from Dupré la Tour et al. on feature-space selection with banded ridge regression, published in Neuroimage.

The work introduces the open-source Python package Himalaya.

Christine Tseng has completed her PhD!

Her dissertation focused on functional mapping of the self, others, and social relationships. Congratulations Dr. Tseng!

New paper from Sara Popham and colleagues on semantic representations in the human brain, published in Nature Neuroscience.