Neurocolloquium

Journal Club

Instructors: Mathis Lamarre, Anuja Negi, Fatma Deniz

Overview

Language English
Credits 3 ECTS
Lecture Period Apr 17 - Jul 17, 2025
Time Thursdays @ 3-4:30pm
Location MAR 5.044
ISIS link


Content

In the neurocolloquium, we read and discuss recent scientific publications from the field of computational cognitive neuroscience. A particular focus will be on literature that uses methods from the field of computer science and artificial intelligence as a means of modelling brain functions – in particular language – as represented in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data.

Learning outcomes

Students will become familiar with topics and debates within the field of language research and cognitive neuroscience. Furthermore, they will learn to read and discuss scientific articles and gain an understanding of how computational approaches can be applied to brain research.

Structure

Each week, one paper will be read in advance and discussed together in detail. At the beginning of the course, each student will be assigned one paper for which they will prepare a small presentation of the methods section which they will present prior to the discussion. Depending in the scope of these method sections, presentations should be around 10-15 minutes and should be accompanied by slides.

Schedule

Date Paper Presenter
Apr 17, 2025 Incremental accumulation of linguistic context in artificial and biological neural networks Mathis Lamarre
Apr 24, 2025 The time scale of redundancy between prosody and linguistic context Peter Neumann
May 1, 2025 Holiday -
May 8, 2025 Holiday -
May 15, 2025 BrainWavLM: Fine-tuning Speech Representations with Brain Responses to Language -
May 22, 2025 A unified acoustic-to-speech-to-language embedding space captures the neural basis of natural language processing in everyday conversations -
May 29, 2025 Holiday -
June 5, 2025 Small is beautiful: In defense of the small-N design Erfan Baradaran Tohidi
June 12, 2025 MindLLM: A Subject-Agnostic and Versatile Model for fMRI-to-Text Decoding -
June 19, 2025 Scaling laws for decoding images from brain activity -
June 26, 2025 From Thought to Action: How a Hierarchy of Neural Dynamics Supports Language Production Erfan Baradaran Tohidi
July 3, 2025 From Language to Cognition: How LLMs Outgrow the Human Language Network Ryan Gelston
July 10, 2025 Multilingual Computational Models Reveal Shared Brain Responses to 21 Languages -
July 17, 2025 On the Biology of a Large Language Model Ryan Gelston