Jonas collaborated with former Max Planck colleagues and the Marinos Imaging Center at Harvard (first author Fahimeh Mamashli) on a re-analysis of a simple speech/language paradigm.
In this new paper out now in J Neurosci, Fahimeh shows that activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) doesn’t just respond to meaning—it predicts it. Using machine learning, we demonstrate that IFG activity can forecast future activity in the superior and middle temporal gyri during the N400 window, a key neural marker of semantic processing. This provides rare, arguably causal, evidence for feedback from frontal to temporal areas, supporting dynamic, bidirectional models of language comprehension.
