Xinchi Yu

the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses.

we tackle this problem in our new preprint!

paper: doi.org/10.64898/202...

w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne

:(

Nowadays I really would prefer harsh reviews such that the paper can be rejected right way, so that it will not fall into a limbo with a friendly name "major revision".

Excited to share our paper (with @jzacks.bsky.social), now out in JEP:LMC!

Event boundaries sometimes disrupt temporal order memory in list-based paradigms—but what happens in narratives with more complex structures that better resemble real life?

✨ Link: psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

🚨New preprint

A recent model proposes that morphological processing is constrained by edge-alignment—only stems and affixes at word edges are subject to decomposition and subsequent activation. We investigate whether edge-alignment is a universal constraint that affects affix activation.

Thread ⬇️

NYAS Publications Calligraphy is the artistic expression of written language, similar to how songs artistically express verbal language. This article proposes a triangular-network model for neural processing of callig...

Came across this interesting Perspective piece from Nai Ding on the neuroscience of calligraphy appreciation:

Ding, N. (2025). Triangular Network Model for the Neural Basis of Calligraphy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

🚨Preprint! “Bayesian surprise tracks the strength of perceptual insight” - Work with @lindedomingo.bsky.social & @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

Ever wondered what factors influence the subjective experience of suddenly understanding a previously unclear input?

Click below:
doi.org/10.64898/202...

🔥 New preprint!

Excited to share Johannah's fantastic work -> a preregistered study with two replications showing how uncertainty shapes perceptual insight.

As always, it’s been a great ride working with Johannah and Carlos.

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour - Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

I am excited to share my first paper, showing that episodic memory formation is theta rhythmic, is now published in Nature Human Behavior! Check it out here: rdcu.be/e6pzS. Thanks to my PI, Katherine Duncan, and to my collaborators for their support on this journey! Stay tuned for iEEG follow up 🧠

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 02 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02416-5Biba et al. show that episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz.

Episodic memory encoding fluctuates at a theta rhythm of 3–10 Hz

Join our lab in Geneva, as a postdoc working on #workingmemory, with both Jarrod Lewis-Peacock and myself !

We think of white matter as the highways of the brain. But when we followed development along those highways, we were surprised. The journey is more complex than we thought. My final PhD paper, “Two Axes of White Matter Development”, is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! 🛣️🧠✨
🔗 bit.ly/wm2axes

The funny thing is, if you travel back in time, these are quite unconventional statements to make and were probably written by a wrong person. But as time goes by, as people start to recognize the role of the hippocampus & synaptic connectivity in STM, these statements don't sound as bad now.

So I happened to be pulling out my high school biology textbook, and apparently it said, "short-term memory is primarily related to the activities and connections among neurons, in particular to a subcortical region that looks like seahorses".

1/6 Happy to share our new paper with @grassocamille.bsky.social and @virginievanw.bsky.social: "Nested contextual change and the temporal compression of episodic memory". www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How hierarchical structures affect the when (what, where) of event memory? Hint: temporal compression 👇

A first virtual reality study by @matthewrlogie.bsky.social as part of experience-project.eu

Assistant Teaching Professor in Computational Social Science and Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

OpenWMData A collection of publicly available working memory datasets

If you are a visual #workingmemory researcher that has a dataset from a delayed recall task with continuous report (the ones using a circular response wheel) and want to share it, please drop a reply. Would love a link to both paper and dataset! See: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData

Been tinkering with schemas for sharing language data over ATProto (the technology that underlies bluesky). Trying to support everything from acceptability and inference judgments to interlinear glossing to syntactic parses to eye and neural recordings. Discussion and comments appreciated. 🐦️🐦️

Excited to share new work on how the brain makes social inferences from visual input! 🧠👯‍♂️
(With @lisik.bsky.social , @shariliu.bsky.social, @tianminshu.bsky.social , and Minjae Kim!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Group photograph of faculty and participants of the very first Cold Spring Harbor summer course on Genetics and Neurobiology of Language in 2014, taken as the sun was going down at the Banbury Campus, Lloyd Harbor.

Please tell friends & colleagues about our unique course “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” July 27-Aug 3 2026. Expert tutors, interactive talks, panel discussions, all in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
@cshlnews.bsky.social @cshlbanbury.bsky.social

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom - Nature Ecology & Evolution Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal resolution of perception.

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues

Different species see the world as fast as they need to...

10 PhD positions at JLU Giessen in the new Research Training Group "PIMON"! We will explore how humans perceive and interact with materials and objects in natural environments.
More information on the project, the PIs, and how to apply here:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
Please share!

Grounding distractor inhibition in action control: Implicit distractor-location learning is viewer dependent Spatial selective attention is typically thought to act as a sensory filter: prioritizing the processing of relevant information at a particular locat…

📢 New paper in Cognition @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with my co-authors: Freek van Ede @freekvanede.bsky.social, Chris Jungerius @cjungerius.bsky.social, and Heleen A. Slagter @haslagter.bsky.social. Grateful to have collaborated with you on this work: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... [1/5]

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:

Four panels showing how an image of a kiwi fruit can be filtered to understand contrast energy.

So @reubenrideaux.bsky.social and I decided to run an image-processing workshop at this year's EPC/APCV. We will be teaching people how to compute the contrast energy of kiwi fruit, I guess. Sign up now: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/

@expsyanz.bsky.social

a little girl is making a funny face while wearing a blue shirt with a leopard print . ALT: a little girl is making a funny face while wearing a blue shirt with a leopard print .

We are excited to announce that we will host WMS2026!
The tentative dates are July 14th-17th, and we are currently looking for a postdoc to join the WMS2026 organizer team.
If you are interested, please submit your application using the link below (Deadline: March 29th)

forms.gle/noqsuEja2tB8...

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our new preprint is out on bioRxiv! @doellerlab.bsky.social
We show that eye-movement sequences actively organize information by aligning with underlying structure and flexibly adapting to cognitive demands in working memory.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects Abstract. Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows active storage of task-relevant visual information. Contrary to the common assumption that the capacity of this system is fixed...

New paper with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JoCN! "Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects" doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...