Here's my favorite science quote from this year! “…several questions remain about the potential role of the liver in navigation.” www.science.org/content/arti...

‘Mind-blowing’: Iron-rich immune cells help homing pigeons navigate

New study identifies a surprising mechanism for sensing Earth’s magnetic field

science.org

We've posted a new group-based lexical-semantic brain viewer! You can now inspect cortical conceptual maps at the group level (24 participants), vertex-by-vertex. Check it out! gallantlab.org/viewer-stori...

Our postdoc Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has released "Its Complicated", a great software library that provides infrastructure to implement naturalistic, complex, interactive experiments in game engines. The toolbox supports peripherals and coding game logic for later analysis. gallantlab.org/Its-Complica...

Check out this great new paper by @alexanderhuth.bsky.social and Jerry Tang, "Rapid cortical mapping with cross-participant encoding models". The paper develops a new framework for using cross-participant encoding models to improve modeling of new participants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Pycortex, our awesome brain viewer software, has a major new feature! Thanks to the hard work of Dr. Matteo Visconti and Aditya Vaidya, Pycortex now supports headless webgl viewers! You can create 3D inflated plots without needing a display, and in Jupyter notebooks! gallantlab.org/pycortex/aut...

We've posted a new fMRI study examining attention across tasks. We compare semantic representations during movie watching to those during naturalistic navigation. We show that attention in different contexts alters semantic representations to optimize performance. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our bilingualism paper is now published in PNAS. We used fMRI to compare semantic brain representations in English-Chinese bilinguals. Semantic representations are largely shared across languages, but finer-grained differences modulate how meaning is represented. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Voxelwise Encoding Models do some things differently from other GLM-related methods because the roots of VEM are in neurophysiology, not psychology. This 2006 paper describes system identification for neurophysiology. Change "neurons" to "voxels" and it all still applies. tinyurl.com/wu-etal-2006

(PDF) Complete functional characterization of sensory neurons by system identification

PDF | System identification is a growing approach to sensory neurophysiology that facilitates the development of quantitative functional models of... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on...

tinyurl.com

Are you on neurotree.org? This site was started @ UCB by my former grad students Stephen David (now Prof at OHSU) and Ben Hayden (now Prof at Baylor), and they've run it ever since (see tinyurl.com/neurotree2026 for history). Please keep your neurotree info updated, it is a great resource!

A recent paper made big waves arguing that fMRI data are hopelessly confounded and uninterpretable. But I'm always suspicious of strong claims that go against a large body of well-supported science. This important post by @alexanderhuth.bsky.social suggests that the paper is fundamentally flawed.

Alexander Huth@alexanderhuth.bsky.social · 7mo ago

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Put this new preprint by T. Zhang on your reading list! People drove a car to navigate in VR. Voxelwise encoding models were fit using 38 feature spaces (28,134 features!). We show the cortical navigation network comprises 11 regions arranged in functional gradients. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

‪Voxelwise Encoding Models (VEMs) are a great framework for modeling fMRI data, but it can be difficult to implement. We've made VEM accessible by providing software, tutorials and reviews that guide its use an implementation. Get it here: gallantlab.org/blog/2025-12... #neuroscience, #neuroimaging