Leehyun Yoon

🚨 We’re hiring! The Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Virginia Tech is looking for a postdoc to join our team studying the neural + computational mechanisms of structure learning and flexible cognition: ccnvt.github.io#positions

Disagreement drives metacognitive development Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent research demonstrating that disagreement prompts competent responses by young children across several metacognitive domains (confidence monitoring, information search, and source monitoring). We then propose a mechanistic model of how disagreement facilitates metacognition. We localize one main source of children’s metacognitive limitations in their still-developing capacities to reason about alternative possibilities, which manifest in an overly narrow focus on one hypothesis. Disagreement increases the child’s likelihood of representing alternative hypotheses, thereby promoting improved metacognitive reasoning. The broader proposal is that, through repeated experiences of disagreement, children become better at representing alternative possibilities even when reasoning on their own, leading to metacognitive development.

Online Now: Disagreement drives metacognitive development

Ruling out Latent Time-Varying Confounders in Two-Variable Multi-Wave Studies There has been considerable interest in estimating causal cross-lagged effects in two-variable, multi-wave designs. However, there does not currently exist a strategy for ruling out unmeasured time...

Betsy McCoach and I have just published a paper in my paper Multivariate Behavioral Research titled “Ruling out Latent Time-Varying Confounders in Two-Variable Multi-Wave Studies.” You can download a copy at doi.org/10.1080/0027... In this thread, I explain what we do in this paper.

The DSAN Lab joined an event organized by the Center for Children and Families and had a beautiful Saturday morning!
Kids stopped by our table to try a fun emotion recognition quiz and learn about opportunities to participate in our studies 🍀

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨

Thrilled to share new research on teaching!
Work supervised by
@cocoscilab.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and @markkho.bsky.social.

This project asks:
When do people teach by mentalizing vs with heuristics? 1/3

osf.io/preprints/os...

Introducing the Neural Strategies Substack Allow me to (re)introduce myself

I've decided to start my own Substack, called Neural Strategies: russpoldrack.substack.com/p/introducin... - I will soon start releasing content from a new open-source book I'm developing, tentatively titled "Better Code, Better Science". Subscribe to receive each new section as soon as I post it!

DANS is happening!! 🎉🎉
Mark your calendars and please spread the word!

UTD Psych labs at @sansmeeting.bsky.social! So wonderful to be together with colleagues and students. Huge thanks to the organizers for making SANS 2025 such a meaningful experience!

The DSAN Lab’s first presentation at
@sansmeeting.bsky.social
! Our amazing undergraduate student, Hamshitha, presented our work on how joint trajectories of victimization and perpetration impact structural brain development in early adolescence.
@cvlneuro.bsky.social

Table 1 Summary Guidelines for Conducting Lab Experiments in Motivation and Emotion ___________________________________________________________________________ Pre-Manipulation Setup • Consider physical environment on the way to the lab room • Consider physical environment of lab room (e.g., cameras, mirror, room size, social) • Create a plausible cover story • Be mindful of the psychological state of participants at the start of experiment Experimenters/Confederates • Ensure consistency between multiple experimenters/confederates • Compare effect of multiple experimenters statistically • Keep appearance/clothing consistent • Be cognizant of informal/formal style of interacting • Note differences in physical attractiveness • Track emotion and personality variables of experimenters • Keep blind to condition Independent Variables (IVs) • Use a strong IV – aim for a psychological sledgehammer • Be careful that IV is not so strong that participants ignore DV • Ensure multiple IVs are similar in strength • Check effectiveness of manipulation and appreciate its complexity • Pre-test to insure IVs are the same psychologically in different times and places • Avoid experimenter demand • Avoid confounds Dependent Variables (DVs) • Create sensitive DVs • Consider challenges with self-reported effort • Consider challenges with self-reported emotion • Be aware that the order of presentation of variables might influence results • Pretest Applying Guidelines to Replications • Consider the benefits of conceptual replications for theory testing • Select studies for replication that have a reasonable chance of being replicated • Note that expectations of non-replication influence researchers and outcomes • Use exact original method when replicating a specific effect • Test correlations that logically follow from experimental hypotheses if possible • Insure participating labs in projects follow instructions of the study coordinators Data Management • Take steps to avoid errors i…

Very useful set of guidelines for conducting social psychology lab experiments by @eddiehj.bsky.social, @davidamodio.bsky.social, and colleagues.

Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Few quotes follow…

What Adolescence gets right (and wrong) about teen boys’ brains It may make for a compelling drama, but young men’s minds are more complex, says one neuroscientist

I wrote an Article about the Netflix drama, Adolescence.

I’ll try to post the pdf because it’s behind a paywall (but you might be able read it for free below)

www.thetimes.com/life-style/p...

YouTube video by OHBM Australia 2024 Webinar Series: Open Science Practices for Neuroimaging

For those interested in brain visualisations and open science practices refer to this amazing webinar series by the OHBM Australia community hosted by @natashaltaylor.bsky.social.

Featured speakers:
@sidchop.bsky.social
@sinamansourl.bsky.social
@sbollmann.bsky.social

youtube.com/watch?v=RTy5...

Data Sharing - ABCD Study

FYI, if you want to be prepared to apply for the next ABCD Study data release, prepare for these new NIST security requirements 🧠: @ohbmofficial.bsky.social abcdstudy.org/scientists/d...

Thanks to everyone's feedback, we have updated our calculator to optimize sample size N & scan time T for fMRI studies: leonoqr.github.io/ORSP_Calcula...

The first new feature is that users can explore how different N & T leads to different accuracy, e.g., N=1000 & T=30min => 81% max accuracy. 🧵

Thank you so much for starting this! I would love to be added.

There's a lot of evidence of the harms of smacking children.

There's also evidence that children and young people learn more from rewards than from punishment, including this computational study by @stepalminteri.bsky.social

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Academic mentees thrive in big groups, but survive in small groups - Nature Human Behaviour Using longitudinal genealogical data on mentor–mentee relations and their publications, the authors find that mentees trained in larger groups tend to exhibit superior academic performance compared with those from smaller groups, provided they remain in academia post graduation.

Research by Zeng et al shows that mentees trained in larger groups tend to exhibit superior academic performance compared to those from smaller groups, as long as they stay in academia after graduation.
https://www.nature.c...

Coming to a Zoom near you!
The affective gradient hypothesis: An affect-centered account of motivated behavior - Dr. Amitai Shenhav

We presented four posters at DACC @cvlneuro.bsky.social! The lab had an incredible time—discussing research with fellow researchers and contributing to the topic of adolescence and social emotion. We were grateful for this opportunity and we’re already looking forward to DACC2027!

Hey neuroimagers!

We've updated NeuroVault.org in response to feedback from the community.

Uploading new images and browsing existing collections is now streamlined and more user friendly.

Check out the new changes in this post. Feedback welcome!

neurovault.github.io/updates/2025...

DSAN Lab is presenting at DACC 2025 @cvlneuro.bsky.social, contributing to its expansion into developmental research! 🎉 Visit us to explore and discuss our preliminary work on adolescent development in social-emotional contexts.

A User’s Guide to Midlife Experts weigh in on the most vexing issues and changes — and how to deal with them.

We’re excited to share that Dr. Gagan Wig was recently featured in The NYT for his expertise on cognition and aging in the article ‘A User’s Guide to Midlife.’ We’re incredibly proud of his continued impact on the field! 👏
Check out the full article:👇👇
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Understanding mindfulness and meditative states using pattern recognition to detect mental states. A brief perspective with Jarrod Lewis-Peacock and Todd Braver.

authors.elsevier.com/c/1kUbL8jVtv...

Received an e-mail asking if we could share the materials of our version of the Anger Incentive Delay Task- they can be found at this link. Note that the codebase is for E-prime

osf.io/4jmeb

How important are your #postdoc years in the likelihood of you staying & succeeding in #academia?

In our newly published paper in @pnas.org, "Postdoc Publications and Citations Link to Academic Retention and Faculty Success," we study the journey of #CareerSuccess of ~45,000 #postdocs.

🧵1/7

This is figure 2, which shows the projected number of incident dementia cases in US adults, 2020–2060, overall and by age, sex and race.

A paper in Nature Medicine projects around 1 million adults in the US could develop dementia each year by 2060, compared with around 514,000 in 2020. The authors estimate that the lifetime risk of dementia after age 55 years is approximately 42%. https://go.nature.com/3Py4o8M #Medsky 🧪

Reflecting on DSAN Lab’s 2024 journey: ✅ Advanced projects on adolescent self-belief & social feedback processing ✅ Built a dedicated team & external collaborations ✅ Developed lab protocols & resources. We’re ready to tackle new challenges and opportunities in 2025! 🚀

Schemas, reinforcement learning and the medial prefrontal cortex - Nature Reviews Neuroscience A computational account of how schemas are learned through experience is lacking. In this Perspective, Bein and Niv synthesize schema theory and reinforcement learning research to derive computational...

Excited to share this perspective with @yaelniv.bsky.social about how schemas might be learned and instantiated via reinforcement learning, latent cause inference, and dimensionality reduction, and what's the medial prefrontal cortex might be doing for all of these www.nature.com/articles/s41...

fMRI Course Instructors

Hello Bluesky! @vcalhoun.bsky.social, Kent Kiehl and I are teaching our 3-day #fMRI course live online January 8 - 10, 2025!
#SPM, #ICA, path analysis, #DataScience.

We've been at it for >20 years & love talking methods & connecting with colleagues!

Register at:
sites.google.com/dartmouth.ed...

It’s been a wonderful first year, growing together with students.