Yongzhen Xie
PhD Candidate in the Mack Lab at the University of Toronto 🇨🇦 🧠 🐦 🐱
Research: category learning, computational modelling, fMRI
Hobbies: learning animal facts, coding, digital art, sculpting
- Reposted by Yongzhen Xie🎉 New preprint 🎉 with Olya Bulatova, @drmack.bsky.social & @keisukefukuda.bsky.social! We decode shapes in working memory from EEG and show that representations are task-dependent, flexibly integrating information about category and task during the memory delay
- Task goals dynamically reconfigure neural working memory representations biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieHow do hippocampal pathways contribute to learning regularities and exceptions? To answer this, Melisa Gumus & @drmack.bsky.social use diffusion imaging to identify the endpoints of different hippocampal pathways, and then analyze functional activity within those "footprints". Super innovative!
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- Reposted by Yongzhen XieWhat determines the perception of orientations in visual cortex, sharp contours or oriented spatial frequencies? It's the contours, the building blocks for shape. Brilliant paper by Seohee Han out in Scientific Reports: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @uoftpsychology.bsky.social
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieBridges can anchor communities as landmarks and even tourist destinations, blend into their environment unnoticed, or they can be eyesores. What determines the aesthetic quality of bridges? Mei Yang, @damianoc.bsky.social, Paul Gauvreau, and I explore this question here: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieEnergy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! Strong evidence in silico and humans, out in PNAS Nexus: tinyurl.com/3kbu8xw4 With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social
- Reposted by Yongzhen Xie"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition". Intuitive cell types are found in random artificial networks using the same selection criteria neuroscientists use with actual data. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 1/2
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieWe're thrilled to announce the publication of our newest paper in @plosone.org 🎉 "Aging and episodic memory specificity: Evidence challenging a domain-general pattern separation decline" Read Dr. Youm's full paper here: doi.org/10.1371/jour... @melaniecohn.bsky.social #Memory #Psychology #Aging
- 🥳 Congrats on your first preprint! 🧠🧠🧠
- Super excited to share my first preprint with Katherine Duncan and Morgan Barense (@barense.bsky.social) -- "Memory strength at reactivation, not memory age, governs prediction error driven updating of naturalistic event memory"! 🧠🎉https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/q9rkn_v1
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieExcited to share that our new paper, “Predictive Looking and Predictive Looking Errors in Everyday Activities,” is now out in JEP: General! 🧠 We examined how people’s eye movements reveal both their predictions and their prediction errors while they watch everyday actions. 👇
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieThe Budding Minds Lab at the University of Toronto is hiring a Postdoc in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory 🧠 🫧 This is (one of) my graduate labs and I can't recommend the department's people, resources, location, or culture strongly enough! see buddingmindslab.utoronto.ca for more
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieI'm pleased to share our new paper, "Attention to complex scene features", now published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics! We investigated how well traditional attention theories generalize to complex scene features, using AI-generated stimuli. Check out the paper here: rdcu.be/elLFK
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieHow might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieHappy to share our study showing a new role for ventromedial PFC in prospection. tinyurl.com/e7kudkby #neuroskyence #psychscisky
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieProud to share the first preprint of my PhD w/ @barense.bsky.social & Mursal Jahed: “Putting the testing effect to the test in the wild: Retrieval enhances real-world memories and promotes their semantic integration while preserving episodic integrity” See thread! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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- Reposted by Yongzhen XieNew preprint from Yining Ding (@liliand.bsky.social)! "Temporal order memory in naturalistic events is scaffolded by semantic knowledge and hierarchical event structure" osf.io/preprints/ps...
- #CNS2025 If you are curious about how hippocampal subfields distinctively support the learning of surprising exceptions to category knowledge, come check out my poster at Session C tomorrow between 5 and 7 pm!
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- Reposted by Yongzhen XieEnergy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! We find strong evidence in silico and human observers! osf.io/preprints/ps... With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieNew starter pack: people doing science with narratives, naturalistic memory, natural conversations, and using language models for psych/cog sci 📖💻📚 (Reply with 🙋 if you'd like to be added!) go.bsky.app/LGRYMvQat://did:plc:o5rl7hzswzpq3g7ysuqd7ced/app.bsky.graph.starterpack/3laz263qdh32o
- Reposted by Yongzhen XiePeople like round contours better than angular contours. Where and how is curvature represented in the brain? With indoor architecture we found a neural dissociation between subjective curvature and computational curvature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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- Looking forward to presenting my work on exception learning at #VSS2024! Come see my poster in the morning of May 18 to discuss how prefrontal, hippocampal, and visual areas can distinctively support the learning of complex visual categories with exceptional items!
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- 🎉 My first first-author paper is now published in PBR! @drmack.bsky.social and l used novel computational modeling & behavioral approaches to show how selective pattern differentiation and integration support learning and generalization of category exceptions! link.springer.com/article/10.3...
- 📖 Link to the online full-text: rdcu.be/dFfkK
- Reposted by Yongzhen XieWe are looking for candidates for a unique postdoc opportunity to work on the role of perceptual grouping in human and computer vision with Sven Dickinson, Kaleem Siddiqi, Zygmunt Pizlo and me. www.bwlab.org/postdoc-posi... Please repost.
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- I will be presenting my poster on Sunday at 5-7pm. Come to chat about edge functional connectivity and how it can be applied to study the neural dynamics in narrative event processing! #CNS2024
