Neurocolloquium

Journal Club

Instructors: Mathis Lamarre, Anuja Negi, Fatma Deniz

Overview

Language English
Credits 3 ECTS
Lecture Period Oct 16, 2025 - Feb 12, 2026
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
Oct 16, 2025 A polar coordinate system represents syntax in large language models Omar Sherif
Oct 23, 2025 Reading comprehension in L1 and L2 readers: neurocomputational mechanisms revealed through large language models Mathis Lamarre
Oct 30, 2025 TRIBE: TRImodal Brain Encoder for whole-brain fMRI response prediction -
Nov 6, 2025 Towards Interpretable Visual Decoding with Attention to Brain Representations -
Nov 13, 2025 Semantic language decoding across participants and stimulus modalities -
Nov 20, 2025 Diverse Perceptual Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective -
Nov 27, 2025 High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models -
Dec 4, 2025 Language models align with brain regions that represent concepts across modalities -
Dec 11, 2025 Divergences between Language Models and Human Brains -
Dec 18, 2025 Semantic change in adults is not primarily a generational phenomenon -
Jan 8, 2026 Individual differences shape conceptual representation in the brain -
Jan 15, 2026 Why Language Models Hallucinate -
Jan 22, 2026 Attention is all you need (in the brain): semantic contextualization in human hippocampus -
Jan 29, 2026 Concepts and Compositionality: In Search of the Brain's Language of Thought -
Feb 5, 2026 Evaluating scientific theories as predictive models in language neuroscience -
Feb 12, 2026 Disentangling signal and noise in neural responses through generative modeling -