Idan A. Blank

Idan A. Blank is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a courtesy appointment in Linguistics. He is affiliated with the Brain Research Institute (BRI) and the Neuroscience Inter-Departmental Program (NSIDP).

His research focuses on understanding language comprehension through neuroimaging (fMRI), behavioral studies, and computational methods. He investigates neural mechanisms underlying semantic processing, temporal receptive windows, and language-specific predictive coding, while comparing machine-learning systems' semantic representations against human cognitive benchmarks.

His publications, spanning journals like NeuroImage, Nature Human Behaviour, and PNAS, explore how language is processed in the brain using functional MRI and machine learning. He previously worked at MIT and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

The BlankLangLab at UCLA, part of the Cognitive Psychology area, also collaborates with the Department of Linguistics to study the mental architecture of language comprehension.