Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 24/09/2026Dr. 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 03915
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 18/09/2026New 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 074
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 29/05/2026Here'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 navigateNew study identifies a surprising mechanism for sensing Earth’s magnetic field 061
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 16/04/2026We'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 · 31/03/2026Our 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 · 29/03/2026Check 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 · 23/03/2026Pycortex, 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.orgPlot 3D Brain Views Headlessly (No Browser) — pycortex 1.3.0.dev0 documentation 0235
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 25/02/2026We'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 · 24/02/2026Our 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 · 23/02/2026We'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 · 29/01/2026Voxelwise 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-2006tinyurl.com(PDF) Complete functional characterization of sensory neurons by system identificationPDF | 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 · 22/01/2026Stephen got one thing wrong in the Transmitter article. He forgot that the tree was motivated by a hand drawn tree of my academic lineage that was posted in our lab. That got him interested in the larger lineage of all neuroscientists. And he was right, that lineage information is valuable! 010
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 22/01/2026Are 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.orgNeurotreeNeurotree - The Neuroscience Academic Family Tree 1110
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 20/01/2026A 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 · 06/01/2026Sorry folks if Bluesky is truncating the link to our VEM blog post, here is a shorter link to the top level of the blog. The VEM post is at the top. gallantlab.org/blog/gallantlab.orgBlogBlog posts from the Gallant Lab 010
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 06/01/2026This cool new study is, as far as I know, the largest computational modeling effort ever undertaken in fMRI. The methods developed for this landmark project push the boundaries on the breadth and depth of information that can be recovered from a single fMRI study. Great work from Dr. Tianjiao Zhang! 010
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 06/01/2026Put 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... 152
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 24/12/2025Hmmm... it seems like bluesky is truncating the URL sometimes... Weird... 000
Jack Gallant @gallantlab.org · 23/12/2025Voxelwise 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