Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

Anna (Anya) Ivanova @neuranna.bsky.social · 15d

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/

neurotaha @neurotaha.bsky.social · 15d

🚨 Paper alert:
To appear in the DBM Neurips Workshop

LITcoder: A General-Purpose Library for Building and Comparing Encoding Models

📄 arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2509.091...
🔗 project: litcoder-brain.github.io

1 6 30

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

Colton Casto @coltoncasto.bsky.social · Apr 21

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 🧵

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...

www.biorxiv.org

2 20 49

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

CantlonLab @cantlonlab.bsky.social · Feb 18

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠

sciencehomecoming.com

Science Homecoming

sciencehomecoming.com

44 690 910

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

steven t. piantadosi @spiantado.bsky.social · Feb 18

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

CantlonLab @cantlonlab.bsky.social · Feb 18

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠

sciencehomecoming.com

Science Homecoming

sciencehomecoming.com

21 37

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Feb 13

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.

Anila D’Mello @aniladmello.bsky.social · Feb 13

Check out our paper ‘Ignoring the cerebellum is hindering progress in neuroscience’ in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social ! With @0xwbj.bsky.social and @amandalebel.bsky.social we quantify the extent of cerebellar exclusion in the neuroimaging literature and discuss reasons/fixes

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…

www.sciencedirect.com

1 7

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Feb 12

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!

Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · Feb 12

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…

www.sciencedirect.com

1 4 16

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

Caroline Nettekoven @carobellum.bsky.social · Feb 22

📣📣📣 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...

Open postdoctoral position for cerebellar imaging and development

www.diedrichsenlab.org

1 1

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

Alexander Huth @alexanderhuth.bsky.social · Jan 3

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...

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?

undark.org

1 6 8

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

Catherine Chen @cathychen23.bsky.social · Sep 15

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...

1 1 5

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Sep 14

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...

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...

www.nature.com

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Sep 14

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.

1

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Sep 14

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...

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

1

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Sep 14

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/...

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....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

1

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Sep 14

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

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 ...

t.co

1

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Sep 14

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...

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...

www.jneurosci.org

1

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Sep 14

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

Client Request ErrorScienceDirect

authors.elsevier.com

1 2 3

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Aug 23

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

OpenNeuro

openneuro.org

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Aug 23

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...

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...

github.com

1

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Aug 23

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.

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...

www.nature.com

1

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Aug 23

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

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

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

www.nature.com

2 9 14

Reposted by Amanda LeBel

steven t. piantadosi @spiantado.bsky.social · Aug 22

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

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

2 20 21

Amanda LeBel @amandalebel.bsky.social · Aug 22

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

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Aug 22

Cortical representations of languages during natural dialogue https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.21.553821v1

5