On Friday 16 May 2025, Dr Alexis Deighton MacIntyre and Dr Jérémy Giroud led a Cambridge Language Sciences-funded workshop on the neural decoding of speech and language at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. This analytical approach seeks systematic correspondences over time between a stimulus and the brain. More specifically, "decoding" can be thought of as short-hand for the reconstruction of specific features or properties of a presented stimulus based on the observed neural response. Decoding models can be applied to continuous data, making this approach compatible with relatively naturalistic experimental tasks, such as listening to an audiobook or podcast. That makes speech decoding a big step forward from traditional paradigms where a listener may hear only single words or short sentences at a time.
The workshop featured talks from specialists with expertise across different decoding techniques, ranging from ridge regression to mutual information analysis. The event brought together researchers at all career stages, including students, research assistants, postdocs, and more senior colleagues. The meeting was designed to feel informal and friendly, encouraging open discussion. As decoding becomes an increasingly adopted method, the workshop served both as a meeting point for experienced researchers and a supportive introduction for newcomers to the field.