Will Decker

Looking forward to #CogSci2025 ! Find us throughout the conference

Atlanta community: we are organizing a CCN @cogcompneuro.bsky.social watch party!

Watch the talks, engage in structured discussions, and (optionally) present your own work.

Register:
forms.gle/AWxVPbrgxkdd...
Schedule:
tinyurl.com/ccn2025atlanta

Georgia Tech’s Neuro Next Initiative has officially evolved into the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). A new era of interdisciplinary research begins today.

🔗 neuro.gatech.edu

#Neuroscience #Neurotech #GeorgiaTech

So far we have CCN local meetups @ NYC @neurograce.bsky.social, Boston @lynnkasorensen.bsky.social, Atlanta @neuranna.bsky.social, Lyon and Bucharest!

Who will host one on even further away from Amsterdam (West Coast? East Asia? Africa?)

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing?

We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

A postdoc in my lab contacted a fellow scientist to get some advice and was told that, because he's currently working on the topic, he "can't give away all his secrets." I find this extremely lame, and yet I keep encountering it. Science is not a zero-sum game!!

New preprint ✨ w/ @olafhauk.bsky.social and Matt Lambon Ralph @mrccbu.bsky.social @cambridgeuni.bsky.social @gatescambridge.bsky.social

The anterior temporal lobe (ATL) seems crucial for both semantic memory and semantic composition. How to make sense of this neuroanatomical alignment? 🧠

🧵

Learning about color from language - Communications Psychology Blind people show similar associations between adjectives (e.g. cold) and colours (e.g. blue) as sighted people; word embedding models trained on corpora of written and spoken language learn these ass...

Very cool work by Qiawen (Ella) Liu, Paridon, @glupyan.bsky.social: e.g., Is white hot or cold?
LMs consider 'white' cold because it's mediated by 'snow'
Ablate the mediators, and you eliminate the associations.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of over 1,000 human brains doing arbitrary tasks A century and a half of neuroscience has yielded many divergent theories of the neurobiology of language. Two factors that likely contribute to this situation include (a) conceptual disagreement…

New brain/language study w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social! We applied task-agnostic individualized functional connectomics (iFC) to the entire history of fMRI scanning in the Fedorenko lab, parcellating nearly 1200 brains into networks based on activity fluctuations alone. doi.org/10.1101/2025... . 🧵

LIT lab is presenting 2 posters at #CNS2025!

Session D - Scaling Laws in Functional Region of Interest (fROI) Analyses by @ruimingao.bsky.social

Session E - Characterizing the effects of content, task and modality on task-driven semantic processing in the brain (sketchpad series) by Jin Li

Key-value memory in the brain Classical models of memory in psychology and neuroscience rely on similarity-based retrieval of stored patterns, where similarity is a function of ret…

Our paper on key-value memory in the brain (updated from the preprint version) is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social
authors.elsevier.com/a/1kqIJ3BtfH...

Excited to introduce funROI: A Python package for functional ROI analyses of fMRI data!

funroi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

#fMRI #Neuroimaging #Python #OpenScience

Work w @neuranna.bsky.social

🧵👇

🚨 New Preprint!!

LLMs trained on next-word prediction (NWP) show high alignment with brain recordings. But what drives this alignment—linguistic structure or world knowledge? And how does this alignment evolve during training? Our new paper explores these questions. 👇🧵

Woah!

Multiple brain activation patterns for the same perceptual decision-making task - Nature Communications Here, the authors show the brain uses multiple activation patterns to perform the same task. Even the default mode network, which is often inactive during focus, plays a role.

New paper alert! Have you ever looked at single-trial fMRI activation maps? If so, you know that they are super variable. Here we show that the variability is not just noise. In fact, the same task can consistently elicit different activation patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ignoring the cerebellum is hindering progress in neuroscience Traditionally considered a motor structure, the cerebellum has been shown to play a key role in several cognitive functions. However, for decades, the…

Many cognitive neuroscientists ignore the cerebellum but it's long past time to pay more attention to it (and fund more cerebellum grants).

Not just for basic science: the cerebellum is commonly affected by pediatric brain tumors, leading to lifelong motor AND cognitive deficits.

Must-read paper 👇🏼

Ignoring the cerebellum is hindering progress in neuroscience Traditionally considered a motor structure, the cerebellum has been shown to play a key role in several cognitive functions. However, for decades, the cerebellum has been largely overlooked and even deliberately excluded from ‘whole-brain’ neuroimaging…

Online Now: Ignoring the cerebellum is hindering progress in neuroscience

Multilingual Computational Models Reveal Shared Brain Responses to 21 Languages At the heart of language neuroscience lies a fundamental question: How does the human brain process the rich variety of languages? Recent developments in Natural Language Processing, particularly in m...

New preprint! 🧠🤖

Brain encoding in 21 languages!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

w/ Saima Malik-Moraleda, @gretatuckute.bsky.social , and @evfedorenko.bsky.social (1/)

Troland Research Award – NAS Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) and to further empirical research within ...

So excited to receive the Troland Award!! Huge congrats to the other winner—Nick Turk-Browne! And TY, as always, to my mentors&nominators, to my amazing labbies past&present, and to all the wonderful and supportive colleagues in our broader scientific community. <3 www.nasonline.org/award/trolan...

(same content as the table in the paper)

My commentary on the do's and don'ts of cognitive evaluations in LLMs is now out in Nature Human Behavior:

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

posting here with a figure that didn't make it into the final draft and is now instead a boring table :P

#CogSci #LLMs #AI

Intrinsic functional connectivity delineates transmodal language functions Communication involves the translation of sensory information (e.g., heard words) into abstract concepts according to abstract rules (e.g., the meaning of those words). Accordingly, using language inv...

🔈 New preprint! 🔈

Intrinsic functional connectivity delineates transmodal language functions

biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

1-> 2 -> 3 -> 3.5 -> 4 -> 4o -> o1 -> o3

I guess we need AGI just to figure out how to name things

Two neuroscientists walk into a bar…