Sign in

Jack Gallant

@gallantlab.org
738 followers 49 following 20 posts

Cognitive, Systems and Computational Neuroscientist, Professor at UC Berkeley, and lab head. Check out our lab web site gallantlab.org For the latest news, publications, brain viewers, code and tutorials, and data.

PostsRepliesMedia
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 24/09/2026
Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience! Encoding models fit 28,134 features to fMRI from a virtual taxi-driving task, revealing 11 distinct cortical regions that transform perception into action. Read the preprint. gallantlab.org
Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience!
03915
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 18/09/2026
New paper from Dr. Tianjiao Zhang accepted in eNeuro: comparing semantic representations during passive movie watching to those measured during naturalistic navigation. Attention in different task contexts alters semantic representations to optimize task performance. gallantlab.org
Dr. Tianjiao Zhang has a new paper accepted in eNeuro.
074
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 29/05/2026
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...
science.org
‘Mind-blowing’: Iron-rich immune cells help homing pigeons navigate
New study identifies a surprising mechanism for sensing Earth’s magnetic field
061
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 16/04/2026
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...
0248
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 31/03/2026
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...
0254
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 29/03/2026
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...
biorxiv.org
081
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 23/03/2026
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...
gallantlab.org
Plot 3D Brain Views Headlessly (No Browser) — pycortex 1.3.0.dev0 documentation
0235
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 25/02/2026
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...
0347
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 24/02/2026
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/...
0304
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 23/02/2026
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...
26326
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 29/01/2026
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
tinyurl.com
(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...
0113
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 22/01/2026
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!
neurotree.org
Neurotree
Neurotree - The Neuroscience Academic Family Tree
1110
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 20/01/2026
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.
042
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 06/01/2026
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...
Anatomical parcellation of navigation network, and high-dimensional functional description of information represented in each of the 11 areas comprising the cortical navigation network.
152
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 23/12/2025
‪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
34613