Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Ph.D.
I’m an Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, working in Jack Gallant’s lab. I’m interested in how our brains build and represent meaning from the world around us. My current research focuses on how these representations differ between people.
To study these questions, I build computational models to predict brain activity when we watch movies, listen to stories, or interact with each other. Then I break these models apart, and see if I can learn something interesting about the brain.
Before coming to Berkeley, I received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, working with Ida Gobbini and Jim Haxby. At Dartmouth, I studied how our brains represent the identity of our friends and colleagues. I used psychophysics and fMRI to study familiar face perception.
News
| Aug 23, 2025 | My latest work on individual differences in conceptual representation is available as a preprint on bioRxiv. This paper introduces a new statistical framework to measure and interpret person-specific functional brain representations, establishing a new paradigm for precision neuroscience. |
|---|---|
| Apr 25, 2025 | We published our tutorial introduction to the Voxelwise Encoding Model framework in Imaging Neuroscience. Check the paper and the tutorials. |
| Oct 07, 2024 | I gave a talk at SFN in Chicago on my work on individual differences in lexical-semantic representations. |
| Jun 20, 2024 | We released a set of tutorials on the Voxelwise Encoding Model framework. Check the preprint and the associated website. |
| Jul 19, 2023 | We have a new preprint on model connectivity, a powerful and more interpretable alternative to functional connectivity. |
Selected publications
-
- Model connectivity: leveraging the power of encoding models to overcome the limitations of functional connectivitybioRxiv, 2023* equal contribution