This is happening this afternoon, definitely go check it out if you are still at SfN

If you're going to #SfN2025, don't miss out on Amanda Chirino's poster on semantic deficits in cerebellar degeneration participants. I am super proud of this project and Amanda Chirino has been doing great work on it!
📍Poster #: F3
🗓️ Date/Time: Wednesday 1PM

I’m hiring! We have an opening in my lab at UC Berkeley for a Staff Research Associate 2. This person will collect and analyze data, work with patients and families, act as point of contact btwn collaborators, maintain lab organization, + more. careerspub.universityofcalifornia.edu/psp/ucb/EMPL...

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social
built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets!

We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it!
1/

The cerebellar components of the human language network The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...

New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network**

with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social

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

1/n 🧵

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sciencehomecoming.com

Join us in supporting NIH and NSF in local papers across the country!

I also want to one point of this paper, the effect the exclusion of cerebellum in research is having on cerebellar patients. Many struggle to find diagnoses or answers from physicians because there is such limited research. A real potential area for improving health outcomes with basic research.

Working on this paper with @aniladmello.bsky.social and @0xwbj.bsky.social was a delight. I feel like anyone who knows me (or probably any cerebellar researcher) has heard this spiel, but hopefully this helps the community take it more seriously!

📣📣📣 Come join a really exciting project on cerebellar development! 📣📣📣

For the Cerebellar Growth Chart project, we still have one postdoctoral position open. Apply by March 5th:
www.diedrichsenlab.org/open_postdoc...

Advances in Mind-Decoding Technologies Raise Hopes (and Worries) Devices that connect brains to computers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Can the fledgling neurorights movement catch up?

Love this piece about our brain decoding work (and Rafa Yuste's tireless advocacy for neurorights) that Fletcher Reveley wrote for Undark: undark.org/2024/01/03/b...

Hi all prospective grad students! Our Equal Access to Application Assistance (EAAA) program for
@Berkeley_EECS is now accepting applications! Any PhD applicant to @Berkeley_EECS can submit their application for feedback by Oct 8 2023: forms.gle/dHq2EPGrkkdc...

Functional boundaries in the human cerebellum revealed by a multi-domain task battery - Nature Neuro... Using a large task battery spanning motor, cognitive, social and affective domains, this functional MRI (fMRI) study provides a comprehensive functional map of the human cerebellum, along with a compa...

It's a super common misconception due to how much of cerebellum research is focused motor. Another great summary of all of the things the cerebellum is involved in is this paper by maedbh king. It really seems like the cerebellar is involved in nearly all tasks www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am really excited in how functional cerebellar work can integrate some of the current research in variability in the cerebellar cellular circuit to come up with better models on what exactly the cerebellum is doing in these cognitive tasks like language.

But! there is still a ton of open questions like is there low level auditory processing? or what computation could the cerebellum be doing? So I want to shout out my favorite recent paper showing that the cerebellar circuit is not nearly as uniform as previously thought doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Cerebellar gray matter differentiates children with early language delay in autism Early language delay (ELD) is one of the earliest indicators of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and predicts later cognitive and behavioral outcomes. We aimed to determine the neural correlates of EL....

AND many communication disorders such as autism and dyslexia both show consistent cerebellar morphological changes which are predictive of language delays and outcomes. All this suggesting that the cerebellum is likely necessary for proper language function.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Language and the Cerebellum: Structural Connectivity to the Eloquent Brain Abstract. Neurobiological models of receptive language have focused on the left-hemisphere perisylvian cortex with the assumption that the cerebellum supports peri-linguistic cognitive processes such ...

This result is also supported by connectivity models which show that there is strong connectivity between the cognitive cerebellum and langauge cortical areas. For example in this recent dMRI paper by Katie Jobson.
t.co/eYbvif4asv

Voxelwise Encoding Models Show That Cerebellar Language Representations Are Highly Conceptual There is a growing body of research demonstrating that the cerebellum is involved in language understanding. Early theories assumed that the cerebellum is involved in low-level language processing. Ho...

Recent MRI research (including my own) has shown that as you move up the language hierarchy from low-level sensory to high level semantics and pragmatics the cerebellum becomes *more* involved
www.jneurosci.org/content/41/5...

I am super excited to share my new review paper cowritten with the great Anila D'Mello where we cover all the recent work on the potential role of the cerebellum in language processing (hint think semantics)
authors.elsevier.com/c/1hlpH8MqMi...

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Lastly lastly, link to the actual dataset itself can be found here: openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...

GitHub - HuthLab/deep-fMRI-dataset: Code accompanying data release of natural language listening fMR... Code accompanying data release of natural language listening fMRI data (LeBel et al.) - GitHub - HuthLab/deep-fMRI-dataset: Code accompanying data release of natural language listening fMRI data (L...

Lastly, since working with naturalistic stimuli can be challenging we have a brief tutorial on best practices in this paper and all of the basic code available here:
github.com/HuthLab/deep...

Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings - Nature Neuroscie... Tang et al. show that continuous language can be decoded from functional MRI recordings to recover the meaning of perceived and imagined speech stimuli and silent videos and that this language decodin...

This extra data includes the data used for the recent decoding paper you might have seen
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Also for people interested in working with more naturalistic language stimuli, we have the full stimulus set of over 15 hours of auditory stimulus with full transcripts.

A natural language fMRI dataset for voxelwise encoding models - Scientific Data Scientific Data - A natural language fMRI dataset for voxelwise encoding models

Our new language fMRI dataset is now published in Scientific Data! And not only that it now includes nearly double the amount of data as the preprint version with up to 15 hours of fMRI per participant!

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroskyence

New open rank job posting at Berkeley psychology - come join the Cognition area!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04035
(Note the quick deadline: Sept 20)

Super interesting paper comparing semantic representations of speech production to speech comprehension. I see this becoming a more popular trend in language neuroscience