Yongzhen Xie

Budding Minds We are a developmental cognitive neuroscience lab located on the St. George campus of the University of Toronto. Our research aims to understand how we form and recall memories, and how we can use...

The 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

I'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

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

How 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...

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex and Intention Representation in Prospective Memory Prospective memory (PM) consists of (i) a retrospective component, comprised of memory for intentions and for the cues that should trigger an action, …

Happy to share our study showing a new role for ventromedial PFC in prospection. tinyurl.com/e7kudkby
#neuroskyence #psychscisky

Proud 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...

Super excited to share the preprint we've been working on, "On a roll: Recent familiarity primes the brain to retrieve other memories via dopaminergic nuclei responses"! Check it out, and come see us at CNS if you're around this afternoon! drive.google.com/drive/u/0/fo...

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...

Poster C151

#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!

Curious about how individual differences in episodic memory traits relate to changes in memory performance over time? Come check out my poster on Sunday, 5-7pm, poster session C, board 66. #CNS2025

Conceptual Roadmap of the present study. To examine the relationship between the metabolic costs of visual processing and aesthetic pleasure, we used both computational and physiological measures to quantify metabolic costs during visual processing: 1. Model-derived estimates of metabolic costs based on the activation of a deep neural network; 2. Metabolic activity of human brains, specifically in the visual processing areas. We found that both measures were inversely related to aesthetic pleasure.

Energy 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

New 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/LGRYMvQ

People 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...

Excited to share a new preprint with Elizabeth McDevitt, Ghootae Kim, and Nick Turk-Browne investigating the role of REM sleep in neural differentiation of memories in the hippocampus! URL: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.01.621588v1 (1/9)

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!

#TAMeG2024 is coming!

May 7 2024 @YorkUniversity

🎯 27 talks
🎯 @tyrellturing.bsky.social keynote
🎯panel on epi mem and AI @aronowitz.bsky.social @WilCunningham @tyrellturing.bsky.social & @morganbarense
🍻 reception (cash bar!), awards, powerpoint karaoke!

tameg.ca

📖 Link to the online full-text: rdcu.be/dFfkK

Thank you, Asaf! It was very nice having you as a part of my foundational research committee team!

Reconciling category exceptions through representational shifts - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Real-world categories often contain exceptions that disobey the perceptual regularities followed by other members. Prominent psychological and neurobiological theories indicate that exception learning...

🎉 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...

Logo of the University of Toronto

Logo of McGill University

Logo of the University of Irvine

We 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.

Come check out our lab's posters at #CNS2024

Featuring work from @doryyongzhenxie.bsky.social , June-Kyo Kim, and Marcus Meng

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

Saturday blitz session 2 is Erik Wing, and session 4 is Keela Thomson. Poster session A is Hannah Marlatte. Sunday Poster session C is Erik, Xuan Zhang and Prateek Dhamija. Monday Poster session E is Marya Nurgitz, Ariana Giuliano and Keela Thomson

Check us out at #cns2024:
Sat.: Erik Wing shows how experts’ schemas (🦆) accelerate training-induced functional & structural (!) cortical plasticity. Keela Thomson on how kids (👶) see the world differently (literally!).  Hannah Marlatte on youths’ PTSD symptoms & its impact on scene construction (🎑)

Interested in chatting about how retrieval can enhance real-world event #memory while also introducing disorganization and distortion? If so, check out my poster with
Morgan Barense this Monday from 8-10 am (D49). We'd love to get feedback on this new work! #CNS2024

Brief category learning distorts the perceptual space of complex scenes! Our new paper is now in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: link.springer.com/article/10.3.... 

@drmack.bsky.social @dirkbwalther.bsky.social