Yang Teoh

I 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

Columbia Psych is hiring *two* junior faculty in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience this year! If you work on cognition (broadly defined), submit your application materials as soon as possible (review starts Nov 1). If you have questions you can reach out to me by email! apply.interfolio.com/175428

The computational and neural dynamics of human motivation and cognitive control at University of Birmingham on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - The computational and neural dynamics of human motivation and cognitive control at University of Birmingham, listed on FindAPhD.com

Looking for a PhD? Interested in cognitive computational neuroscience, motivation and decision-making? See our project listed in the BBSRC MIBTP competition for funding for a 4-year PhD in the @msnlab.bsky.social in the @thechbh.bsky.social. Deadline 27/11. More info: tinyurl.com/5d5vz8m7

Sustained alpha oscillations serve attentional prioritization in working memory, not maintenance Recent theory on the neural basis of working memory (WM) has attributed an important role to "activity-silent" mechanisms, suggesting that sustained neural activity might not be essential in the reten...

New preprint!

Working memory contents can be decoded from alpha band power. But does working memory maintenance really depend on these oscillations?

We say no, because we found that alpha power decoding only works for prioritized items, not deprioritized ones. 1/3

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neurocomputational basis of learning when choices simultaneously affect both oneself and others Nature Communications - When learning to make choices that simultaneously affect the self and others, asymmetric encoding of information guides future social behaviors across mutually beneficial,...

📢 Thrilled to share our paper is out now in @natcomms.nature.com

Shared computations underlie how we acquire actions that are mutually beneficial, instrumentally harmful (benefits self at the expense of others), altruistic (benefit others at the expense of self), or mutually costly

🧵 rdcu.be/eL8mZ

1st Sharp Lab preprint! 🚨 We tested how anxiety affects task generalization—not how people generalize threat stimuli, but how they reuse action-outcome structures when planning in new contexts.

Worry makes people avoid reusing actions that co-occurred w/ threat!
📄: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵 1/12

Motivation as Neural Context for Adaptive Learning and Memory Formation Our memories shape our perception of the world and guide adaptive behavior. Rather than a veridical record of experiences, memory is selective. An accumulating body of work suggests that motivational ...

How does motivation shape learning and memory? In a new review w @ralisonadcock.bsky.social, we propose that under different motivational ‘moods', neuromodulators set distinct neural contexts to determine information processing and memory formation.
doi.org/10.1146/annu...
#psychscisky #neuroskyence

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

Ever slam on the brakes after seeing a speed trap? Or better yet, slow down ahead in anticipation?

In our new paper w/ @anask07.bsky.social in @cp-iscience.bsky.social, we use #iEEG to study the neural basis of reactive and proactive control in medial and lateral PFC.
tinyurl.com/4bbwbffv

Paper and R package for (more flexible) power analysis in multilevel: psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

I’m hiring at all levels and accepting graduate students through Psychology and the Graduate Program in Neuroscience. Reach out if you’re interested in joining a collaborative, fun, creative, and supportive team in beautiful Vancouver! 🏔️ ⛷️ 🏖️ 🌆

thanks for putting it together. would like to be added if possible.

Tour de force talk decomposing aspects of novelty, surprise, info gain in multi-state tasks by @modirshanechi.bsky.social

Novelty-seeking (visit new states) is common...even when its suboptimal
#CISE2025

Alice Xia, Brown G5 PhD student, studies strategic gossiping in social networks (lab and field) #CISE2025

www.feldmanhalllab.com/people
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 Interested in applying computational methods to advance understanding of mental health? Join us for the New York Computational Psychiatry Workshop (Nov 10-12)!

Apply by Oct 13: form.jotform.com/252448781112...
More info: bit.ly/nycpw2025

Please share & RT!

Ondrej is a great scientist and mentor - I highly recommend working with him!

Truly proud that Ondrej is the first faculty to come from our lab.

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Mark Chen | Department of Psychology

My website is official 🙌 Excited to share that I am interested in reviewing applications for Harvard’s Clinical Science PhD program this fall as I look for the first student to join my lab! I appreciate it if you can share with your network :)
psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/mark-...

🚨We're hiring!🚨 The Dept of Psychology at Rutgers is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology. Review of applications begin on Oct 18. Details here: jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/259...

I'm chairing the search committee and am happy to field questions about the position. 🧵

🌵🏜️🌵 New preprint! How do people learn from ambiguous feedback, like whether someone is laughing *with* you 😆 or *at* you 😏? A very fun collab w/ the brilliant @rbhui.bsky.social A brief thread...👇

📖 osf.io/preprints/ps...

The individual, relational and societal costs of striving to feel good

Review by Brett Q. Ford

Web: go.nature.com/44LVyN4
PDF: rdcu.be/exQoL

#psychscisky #psychology

Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"!

Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

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

Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip - Nature Human Behaviour People use knowledge of social network structure—that is, popularity and distance—to strategically spread gossip. To achieve this, they draw on internal models that capture the cascading dynamics of i...

New study shows people use popularity & social distance to strategically spread gossip. @yyangteoh.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The work I love most blends learning about theory with answering something practical. Here, we got to hit both nails on the head!

Come for the "Does implicit bias change generalize across implicit measures?" Stay for the "Can we reduce anti-fat bias?" Or vice versa. Just read the paper; it's great!

New preprint of my dissertation work on emotion expressions with Cendri Hutcherson showing how our computational model based on the communicative value of emotion expression captures the full range of people's expressive behaviors, from straightforward expression, to suppression, and even deception!

P.S. This was a herculean team effort that started way before I got involved in the project, and I was lucky to have had the opportunity to work with such a cool dataset.

First preprint out of my postdoc w/ @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social and Oriel FeldmanHall: Our brains encode maps of social connectivity in real-world networks which support key functions like tracking information spread and fostering social cohesion within our communities.

I just posted a new notebook:

Causal Inference with the 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚜 📦 for #Rstats. It introduces the idea of G-Computation and tries to demystify the differences between ATE, ATT, and ATU.

This is a first draft and I would looove any feedback!

marginaleffects.com/chapters/gco...

New WP!
The illusory truth effect (repetition -> belief) is core to psych of beliefs, & thought to be a deep bias impacting misinfo, persuasion & advertising

Why would cognition include such a flaw? We argue it is a rational adaptation to high-quality info environments 🧵1/

With ⏱️ spent on social media increasing each year, it's key to figure out we can engage in ways that improve well-being😁, rather than reducing it😭. In work now out in Emotion, I argue Positive Empathy can be a useful practice to achieve this end doi.org/10.1037/emo0.... No access? Check my website: