Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

The SoNIC Lab is in San Francisco for #CogSci2025; come check out our latest research!

As chatbots get smarter, humans' unique language abilities are becoming less special - Berkeley News UC Berkeley researchers say large language models have gained "metalinguistic ability," a hallmark of human language and cognition no other animal has displayed.

For the first time, metalinguistics and recursion are not exclusively human abilities. Large language models can do them too.

This research is an example of “behavioral interpretability” of LLMs—using prompting to understand inner representations of AI.

news.berkeley.edu/2025/07/14/a...

Interpersonal Cardiac Synchrony During Emotional Sharing Between Strangers: https://osf.io/nmj5k

Hands holding a copy of "Natural Neuroscience: Toward a System Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors" by Nachum Ulanovsky. Along the bottom of the cover is a skyline of trees. In the background and center, a faint drawing of the brain from a birds eye view.

"Ideally, it will not only inspire neuroscientists to make their studies more 'natural' but also encourage behavioral ecologists to tackle the neural basis of fascinating behaviors."

@science.org reviews "Natural Neuroscience" by Nachum Ulanovsky: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Scream Club Chicago offers a safe release of bottled-up energy Manny Hernandez has been leading a group in weekly screaming sessions by the lake. The breath-work practitioner says the exercise helps externalize internal tensions.

Scream Club Chicago offers a safe release of bottled-up energy in weekly sessions by the lake. The breath-work practitioner says the exercise helps externalize internal tensions.

https://trib.al/ZWVNpjv

The Social Aspect of Catspeak What cat-inspired language says about us

New mewsletter out today: what using catspeak says about us 🧪 #linguistics open.substack.com/pub/purrspec...

The PEER2025 schedule is up! 👇

So grateful for the recognition and support!

Excited to be part of this work led by @hayoungsong.bsky.social! We used scrambled narratives, fMRI, and free-form verbal responses to study how the brain arrives at insights!

Excited to share our new preprint! Using a narrative reading paradigm, we showed that temporal order memory reconstruction can depend on multiple sources of information - factors like knowledge about typical event order and hierarchical event structure can both play important roles! 📖🧠

Dynamic brain connectivity predicts emotional arousal during naturalistic movie-watching Author summary This study explores how the brain represents two key dimensions of emotional experience: valence (how positive or negative an experience feels) and arousal (the level of emotional activ...

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...

Calling all couples in the Chicago area! 💕 I'm launching a new study with @ycleong.bsky.social and @lydiaemery.bsky.social to explore brain responses during conversations between couples. If you're interested, please fill out our brief screener! ssd.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Past and present caregiving experiences impact prefrontal connectivity and recall for attachment-schema narratives We investigated how past and current caregiving experiences impacted emotional event processing by examining inter-subject functional correlation in 7- to 15-year-olds during narrative movies depictin...

New preprint 🎉: How do episodic memory, emotions, and schemas for caregiver experiences come together in kids’ brains and verbal recall? Check out our new results showing how past and present childhood experiences shape perception and memory for movies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Person Knowledge Is Independently Encoded by Allocentric and Egocentric Reference Frames Within Separate Brain Systems - Robert S. Chavez, Taylor D. Guthrie, Jack M. Kapustka, 2025 Knowing the similarities among others is critical for navigating our social environments and building relationships. However, people can evaluate the similarity...

Very proud to finally share our latest paper "Person Knowledge is Independently Encoded by Allocentric and Egocentric Reference Frames within Separate Brain Systems," officially out at Psych Science.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Join us on May 21 for AI, Creativity & a Changing World, a special symposium on the latest in Creativity & AI research:
🔹 AI & Human Co-Creativity
🔹 Advances in Automated Creativity Scoring
🔹 Expert panel on future trends led by @roger-beaty.bsky.social

Registration opens next week!
#SfNC2025

Enhancing creativity through neurofeedback:
Check out our recent paper where we use covert neurofeedback to entrain default-executive coupling during creative thinking!

Xinbing (Jack) Zhang, Jack White, Michael Luehrs, Michal Ramot, & @roger-beaty.bsky.social

t.co/glnpPNmJ6R

Sculpting new visual categories into the human brain | PNAS Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report an alternate route for humans to a...

New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

List of psychology-related starter packs!
#Psychology #AcademicSky 🧪 🧵

Cross-Cultural Psychology and Quant Anthropology
by @drboothroyd.bsky.social

Excited to attend my first in-person conference since the pandemic! Stop by my poster (5097) to chat about speech, prosody, and social interactions. And don’t miss the other amazing posters from my lab too! #psynom24

Our lab has a new #musiccognition preprint out! This is a comprehensive look at how listeners integrate musical context across multiple timescales to complete a diverse array of tasks: memory, prediction, and event segmentation. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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