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Agata Wolna

@awolna.bsky.social

80 followers 110 following 45 posts

Neuroscience of Language | Post-doc in EvLab at MIT

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Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Excited to share new work on the language system!

Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/
Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social

Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thread below!👇🧵

The extended language network: Language selective brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered

Although language neuroscience has largely focused on core left frontal and temporal brain areas and their right-hemisphere homotopes, numerous other areas - cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar - ha...

Reposted by Agata Wolna

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

Reposted by Agata Wolna

Cory Shain @coryshain.bsky.social · Mar 31

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... . 🧵

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…

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Data, code, and the newly-identified set of cortical parcels are freely available at osf.io/7594t/. (15/15)

The extended language network: Language-responsive brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered

Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Lesson 3️⃣: Non-selective areas may also be important to understand language in the🧠

Some regions respond to both amodal language, as well as to non-linguistic tasks. These mixed functional profiles may reflect a role in integrating information across cortical networks. (14/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Lesson 2️⃣: The components of spatially distributed systems are still highly focal.

At the individual level, the full set of 22 language-selective areas, although distributed across many brain regions, takes up <1.5% of the brain volume—about the size of a large🍓. (13/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Lesson 1️⃣: Not all “language tasks” are created equal

Some brain areas where responses to “language tasks” have been reported don’t survive our criteria for what counts a high-level, amodal and selective language region These include occipital areas and the basal ganglia. (12/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

📌To summarize: these are the three main lessons coming from our work: (11/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

We also looked at the Harvard-Oxford Subcortical parcellation where we found selective responses to language in bilateral amygdalae and hippocampi, non-selective but robust responses to both language tasks left thalamus shows, but no proof for neither in the basal ganglia: (10/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

To make sure we did not miss anything, we also systematically searched for language-selective responses in 3 standard atalses: DKT, Harvard-Oxford Cortical, and Glasser parcellation. These results converge with our data-driven functional parcellation. (9/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

These 12 new regions constitute new targets for systematic evaluation in future work, to understand how they contribute to language processing, and whether their role is distinct from that of the core language areas. (8/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

… two regions in the right and one in the left cerebellum (for in-depth characterization of cerebellar language regions look out for an imminent preprint from @coltoncasto.bsky.social!): (7/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

… bilateral areas in the ventral temporal poles and the left BTLA (see also Jin Li's work: tinyurl.com/2t98jkks): (6/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

…which leaves 12 newly established language-selective regions!

These include three medial frontal regions and a region in the left precuneus: (5/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Using group-constrained subject-specific parcellation, we identified 27 candidate language regions in the🧠.
22 of the 27 regions show robust, amodal response to language, and 20 are selective for language. These include the core language regions and their right homotopes. (4/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

We then tested whether these areas—defined within individuals by the reading-based localizer (A), generalize to auditory language comprehension (B), and whether they are selective relative to a non-linguistic difficult task (C). (3/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Here using a dataset of 772 participants who completed a validated language localizer task (reading sentences vs. nonwords), we identified a set of 27 candidate language-responsive regions in the brain. (2/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Language processing recruits a left fronto-temporal🧠network. However, language tasks often engage regions beyond this core system. As many paradigms don’t isolate language from speech or task demands, it’s hard to know if these non-core areas are real "language" regions. (1/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Excited to share new work on the language system!

Using a large fMRI dataset (n=772) we comprehensively search for language-selective regions across the brain. w/
Aaron Wright, @benlipkin.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social

Link to the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thread below!👇🧵

The extended language network: Language selective brain areas whose contributions to language remain to be discovered

Although language neuroscience has largely focused on core left frontal and temporal brain areas and their right-hemisphere homotopes, numerous other areas - cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar - ha...

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Lesson 2️⃣: The components of spatially distributed systems are still highly focal.

At the individual level, the full set of 22 language-selective areas, although distributed across many brain regions, takes up <1.5% of the brain volume—about the size of a large🍓. (13/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

Lesson 1️⃣: Not all “language tasks” are created equal

Some brain areas where responses to “language tasks” have been reported don’t survive our criteria for what counts a high-level, amodal and selective language region These include occipital areas and the basal ganglia. (12/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

📌To summarize: these are the three main lessons coming from our work: (11/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

We also looked at the Harvard-Oxford Subcortical parcellation where we found selective responses to language in bilateral amygdalae and hippocampi, non-selective but robust responses to both language tasks left thalamus shows, but no proof for neither in the basal ganglia: (10/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

To make sure we did not miss anything, we also systematically searched for language-selective responses in 3 standard atalses: DKT, Harvard-Oxford Cortical, and Glasser parcellation. These results converge with our data-driven functional parcellation. (9/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

These 12 new regions constitute new targets for systematic evaluation in future work, to understand how they contribute to language processing, and whether their role is distinct from that of the core language areas. (8/n)

Agata Wolna @awolna.bsky.social · Apr 3

… two regions in the right and one in the left cerebellum (for in-depth characterization of cerebellar language regions look out for an imminent preprint from
@coltoncasto.bsky.social !): (7/n)