Human speech carries information beyond the words themselves: pitch, loudness, duration, and pauses–jointly referred to as ‘prosody’–emphasize critical words, help group words into phrases, and convey emotional and other socially-relevant information. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identify a set of prosody-responsive brain areas and then richly characterize them across 8 experiments (25 experimental conditions; […]

For a long time, working memory was considered to reflect sustained activity in prefrontal and parietal areas. This has been challenged by the "sensory recruitment model" according to which sensory areas are involved in maintaining working memory representations. The main support for this comes from the finding that working memory contents can be decoded from […]

Silent visual reading is accompanied by the phenomenological experience of an inner voice. However, the temporal dynamics and functional role of the underlying neural representations remain unclear. Here, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data while humans read naturalistic narratives, and applied computational modelling to isolate time-resolved auditory from visual and semantic representations. Our results revealed robust […]

Many studies have analyzed what organizational features distinguish the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, with most differences typically being found in language areas. In this analysis, we test whether supervised learning can categorize an unseen hemisphere as right or left based on functional connectivity. Using data from the Human Connectome Project, we […]

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1) and Huntingtons disease (HD), are motor diseases caused by CAG expansions in ATXN1 and HTT, where SCA1 shows prominent cerebellar neurodegeneration and HD shows prominent striatal neurodegeneration, particularly in the Medium Spiny Neurons (MSNs). Since human and mouse studies demonstrate progressive striatal vulnerability in SCA1, we examined age-dependent molecular, cellular […]

Myeloid Cell Leukemia-1 (MCL-1) is an anti-apoptotic protein that is crucial for early neurodevelopment. Loss of MCL-1 results in embryonic lethal neurodevelopmental defects that cannot be rescued by other anti-apoptotic proteins of the BCL-2 family. Here, we find a non-apoptotic role for MCL-1 in sustaining mitochondrial cristae integrity, fatty acid oxidation (FAO), and neural progenitor […]

Growing evidence indicates that visual search is influenced not only by perceptual but also by semantic information. Among such semantic influences, categorical effects have been extensively studied. By contrast, the influence of contextual associations, that is, how objects commonly co-occur within specific scene contexts, remains less understood. Here, we orthogonally manipulated contextual and categorical relationships […]

Poly (ADP-Ribose) Polymerase inhibitors (PARPi) induce cytotoxicity in homologous recombination repair (HRR)-deficient cancers by causing PARP1 to become trapped on chromatin, resulting in irreparable replication-associated DNA damage. Although increased clearance of trapped PARP1 from chromatin reduces the sensitivity of cancer cells to PARPi, details surrounding this process remain unclear. PARPi exposure is known to cause […]