Hayoung Song
studying cognitive dynamics and how the brain computes | postdoc-ing at WashU CTCN
hyssong.github.io
- Reposted by Hayoung Song#CNS2026 Young Investigator Award Lecture 1 - Neural Signatures of Sustained Attention Across Time Scales and Individuals, Monica Rosenberg, Ph.D. Monday, March 9, 2026, 1:30 - 2:00 pm Find out more: www.cogneurosociety.org/young-invest... @cogneuronews.bsky.social
- Reposted by Hayoung SongMy lab is recruiting a postdoc and a full-time research technician to work on an NIH-funded project studying age-related changes in memory for naturalistic events. Behavior, fMRI, and blood-based biomarkers. 3+ years funding guaranteed. Postdoc: tinyurl.com/ykjfbnj8 Tech: tinyurl.com/2f2hw3f5
- Reposted by Hayoung Song🧠 Hiring a Research Assistant/Lab Manager! Share widely! 📍 St. Louis | ⏰ Full-time We're launching the How We Learn Lab @WashU, studying attention, learning & memory interactions. Perfect for anyone interested in dev cog neuro who wants hands-on experience before grad school. deckerlab.com
- Reposted by Hayoung SongWith some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
- Reposted by Hayoung SongThis is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
- Reposted by Hayoung Songstarting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊
- Reposted by Hayoung SongJust published my "Programming for Psychologists" course! 👩💻 github.com/Naubody/prog... Designed for Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience Master's students starting their programming journey at @vuamsterdam.bsky.social. Feel free to share! Feedback welcome!
- Reposted by Hayoung SongInterested in how the brain prepares for upcoming tasks? We trained a monkey on “6” different cognitive tasks and recorded prefrontal cortical activity. We examined the neural geometry and dynamics during task preparation. Come check out our poster on SUNDAY(Nov 16) from 1-5 PM!
- I'm going to present our latest memory model that learns causal inference during narrative comprehension! Stop by the poster on Monday to chat about causality, memory, brain🧠, and AI🤖! #sfn2025 #sfn25
- Reposted by Hayoung SongExcited 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 Hayoung Song🎓Recruiting Ph.D. students for Fall 2026!🎓 The Feilong Lab @sc.edu studies commonalities & differences across brains, and how they relate to cognition, language, & disorders. We develop brain templates, improve hyperalignment, and compare human brains with monkey brains & DNNs. feilonglab.github.io
- Reposted by Hayoung SongHidden Markov Models Speaking of HMMs, really enjoyed this paper on dynamics underlying resting state and other conditions. The idea of a baseline state from which excursions lead to more integrated states is really interesting. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... #neuroskyence
- Reposted by Hayoung Song1/ To reduce distraction and boost focus, nothing works better than linking performance to rewards 💰 But what about focusing to avoid penalties? Turns out — it works too… just not as much as combining both! Check out our new preprint 👇 w/ Ed Vogel and @monicarosenb.bsky.social
- Reposted by Hayoung SongHad a great time chatting with CASNL alum @sudkrc.bsky.social and sharing our recent work on arousal! Her editing/producing skills are next-level - she somehow wrangled my scattered brain into something that actually sounds coherent... A true miracle worker 😅
- NEW EPISODE OUT🧠!! In this episode, Su @sudkrc.bsky.social chats with Dr. YC Leong @ycleong.bsky.social of The University of Chicago on how dynamic brain connectivity predicts emotional arousal while watching Sherlock🕵️🧐 🎧LISTEN NOW: open.spotify.com/episode/5W22...
- Reposted by Hayoung Song🏆 #CNS2026 Young Investigator Award Winners 🏆 Congratulations to Monica Rosenberg and Samuel D. McDougle, recipients of the 2026 Young Investigator Award! 🎉 We look forward to their award lectures at the CNS 2026 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada! 🇨🇦✨ @cogneuronews.bsky.social
- Reposted by Hayoung SongI will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com
- Reposted by Hayoung SongA RNN with episodic memory, trained on free recall, learned the memory palace strategy -- the network developed an abstract item index code so that it can “walk along” the same trajectory in the hidden state space to encode/retrieve item sequences! Feedback appreciated!
- I’m excited to share my recent preprint on a neural network model of free recall that learns multiple memory strategies including the memory palace! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongOut now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw
- In this article, @jadynpark.bsky.social et al find that emotionally arousing moments during a narrative are associated with heightened integration across functional brain networks, which in turn predict how well those moments are then remembered.
- Reposted by Hayoung SongNew paper out! Revisiting the DMN's self-related processing from an embodied view🧠💪 Huge thanks to @choongwanwoo.bsky.social and @jeongin-lee00.bsky.social for enriching my internal model with great insights and fun discussions along the way!
- Our new paper is out in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences; a perspective paper on the DMN, titled "Embodying the default mode network: self-related processing from an embodied perspective" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongSix of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S. Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world. www.nobelprize.org
- Reposted by Hayoung SongVery excited to share that my first paper, with Peter Mende-Siedlecki and @leorhackel.bsky.social, is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com! ☺️ Can getting more rewards make you feel more skilled, even if your performance doesn't change? www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongExcited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! 🧠✨! I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com Reposts are very welcome! 🙌 Please help spread the word!
- Reposted by Hayoung SongI'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.
- Reposted by Hayoung Song1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.
- Reposted by Hayoung SongNew preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/
- Reposted by Hayoung SongLast month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out! www.momentslab.org
- This is such a well crafted study with compelling findings!👏🎊
- Very excited to announce my student Andreas Arslan's first paper, "Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events" in Cognition! Out now open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Andreas isn't on bsky, but he very kindly wrote a summary thread for me to share. 🧵 (1/24)
- Reposted by Hayoung SongHow does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Hayoung Song👩💻 New preprint out (FIRST one of my PhD journey) with the incredible @lindedomingo.bsky.social @ortiztudela.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social "From sudden perceptual learning to enduring engrams: A representational perspective" 🧠 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
- Reposted by Hayoung Song🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1
- Reposted by Hayoung SongHow 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 Hayoung Songcheck out @hayoungsong.bsky.social's new work combining RNNs, fMRI and verbal reports to study how the brain represents and retrieves causally related memories while watching a TV episode! has been super fun to be part of this!
- How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇
- Reposted by Hayoung SongKey-value memory network can learn to represent event memories by their causal relations to support event cognition! Congrats to @hayoungsong.bsky.social on this exciting paper! So fun to be involved!
- How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇
- How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇
- The model watched a tv drama🎬 like participants in a previous fMRI study. From lesioning each component of the model, we found that the model learns causal structure by dissociating the representations used for memory encoding (value) and retrieval (key).
- This was a huge team effort ⭐: @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen, Janice Chen, @ycleong.bsky.social, @monicarosenb.bsky.social, ShiNung Ching, @jzacks.bsky.social We welcome feedback!
- Reposted by Hayoung Song1/ 🚨 Preprint alert! How does the brain make sense of continuous experience? We find that continuous experiences can be compressed using a subset of key moments that dominate comprehension and recall. 👉 doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.…
- Reposted by Hayoung SongNew preprint! 🧠 Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10). doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Preprint⭐ Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- This has been an immense team effort w/ Ruiqi Chen, @tommybotch.bsky.social, Todd Braver, @monicarosenb.bsky.social, @jzacks.bsky.social, & ShiNung Ching We would appreciate your feedback on the work!
- Reposted by Hayoung SongWe’re hiring! Pls share widely: In conjunction w/ the @bowers-wbhi.bsky.social, my team is recruiting a full-time clinical research coordinator to assist with research efforts at UC Santa Barbara. 1-2 yrs experience in MRI data collection preferred. Submit apps to: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02974
- Reposted by Hayoung SongMy first time presenting this line of work, linking environmental exposures, attention problems, and attention-related brain networks in the ABCD Study at the MSTP retreat! Thank you to my collaborators for your support!@monicarosenb.bsky.social @ariellekeller.bsky.social and others not on bluesky.
- Reposted by Hayoung Song"Eureka! The brain science behind lightbulb moments" - Excellent coverage in Nature of research on the neuroscience of Aha moments, including our research on this phenomenon. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongHaving severe FOMO for missing #OHBM2025, but please reach out if you are interested in postdoc opportunities in our lab! Enjoy the science and sunshine!!
- Reposted by Hayoung SongIncredibly excited and grateful to share that I’ll be starting a lab at The Ohio State University this(!) fall! My lab will study human learning and memory, with related interests in sleep, stress, and time perception. More info soon, but do get in touch if you’re interested in joining!
- Reposted by Hayoung Song🧠📖 New paper out! How does the brain make sense of a story? Combining behavioral data, #fMRI, and #LLMs, our study explores how distinct hippocampal-cortical systems support the #encoding and #sequencing of #narrative events during ongoing comprehension. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongA Temporal Hierarchy of Sustained Attention Dynamics journals.sagepub.com/share/YUQSMC...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongNew preprint! Thrilled to share my latest work with @esfinn.bsky.social -- "Sensory context as a universal principle of language in humans and LLMs" osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongNew preprint from the Hasson Lab🪄Delineates coupling b/w regions within the language network AND shows the elements of language that connect them. Led by @ahmadsamara.bsky.social; thanks @samnastase.bsky.social Zaid Zada & Uri Hasson. 💥 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongI’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)
- Reposted by Hayoung Song🎨🧑🎨 Looking for a tool to visualize subcortical/thalamic data in 2D? Check out this python-based package I put together (subcortex-visualization on PyPI), plus a guide for creating your own custom atlas meshes and vector graphics! All feedback/tips welcome 😊 anniegbryant.github.io/subcortex_vi...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongFeeling fortunate that #SANS2025 was in Chicago, and so much of the lab was able to be part of the meeting! It's crazy how much the lab has grown over the past 3y10m, and I'm so proud of the work we are doing together! Happy that we could host the lab, alums (and surprise guests)! #CASNL@SANS
- Reposted by Hayoung SongExcited to see this in "print"! Work led by @jinke.bsky.social decoding emotional arousal across fMRI movie datasets!
- Now out in Plos Computational Biology! We identified a generalizable neural signature of emotional arousal across contexts and individuals during movie watching. work with the best team: @hayoungsong.bsky.social @Zihan Bai @monicarosenb.bsky.social @ycleong.bsky.social dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongNow out in Plos Computational Biology! We identified a generalizable neural signature of emotional arousal across contexts and individuals during movie watching. work with the best team: @hayoungsong.bsky.social @Zihan Bai @monicarosenb.bsky.social @ycleong.bsky.social dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
- 🚨 Center for Theoretical & Computational Neuroscience @WashU invites applications from postdocs and senior graduate students to join the ⭐Computational Neuroscience Next Generation symposium (Sep 15-16 2025), travel expenses paid! ctcn.wustl.edu/2025-next-ge... Visit WashU to share your work!
- Reposted by Hayoung SongSave the date! If you're going to CNS, stop by my poster on Sunday evening to get the whole story about what hippocampal timescales can tell us about memory and aging! Poster C42 #CNS2025
- Check out Yining's @liliand.bsky.social tour-de-force work on temporal order memory using naturalistic events! ⭐
- New 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...
- Reposted by Hayoung SongNew ms! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I developed a normative coding theory for feedback-modulated canonical networks, providing a unified view of (1) efficient & predictive coding, (2) computational & algorithmic principles, (3) unimodal & multimodal sensory processing.
- Reposted by Hayoung SongRemember what your partner said during a heated argument? Or the rush of getting your first job offer? Why do these emotionally arousing moments stick? Across 3 studies, and 3 arousal measures, we found that emotional arousal enhances memory encoding by promoting functional integration in the 🧠 1/🧵
