@hayoungsong.bsky.social
studying cognitive dynamics and how the brain computes | postdoc-ing at WashU CTCN https://hyssong.github.io/
a red building on UPENN's campus photographed during the fall
the Philadelphia skyline, with clear skies and autumn trees
starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu π₯³
my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception
currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science!
reach out if you're interested π
Just published my "Programming for Psychologists" course! π©βπ» github.com/Naubody/prog...
Designed for Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience Master's students starting their programming journey at @vuamsterdam.bsky.social.
Feel free to share! Feedback welcome!
Interested in how the brain prepares for upcoming tasks? We trained a monkey on β6β different cognitive tasks and recorded prefrontal cortical activity. We examined the neural geometry and dynamics during task preparation. Come check out our poster on SUNDAY(Nov 16) from 1-5 PM!
15.11.2025 03:01 β π 9 π 4 π¬ 0 π 0
I'm going to present our latest memory model that learns causal inference during narrative comprehension! Stop by the poster on Monday to chat about causality, memory, brainπ§ , and AIπ€!
#sfn2025 #sfn25
Excited to share that our new paper, βPredictive Looking and Predictive Looking Errors in Everyday Activities,β is now out in JEP: General! π§
We examined how peopleβs eye movements reveal both their predictions and their prediction errors while they watch everyday actions.
π
πRecruiting Ph.D. students for Fall 2026!π
The Feilong Lab @sc.edu studies commonalities & differences across brains, and how they relate to cognition, language, & disorders.
We develop brain templates, improve hyperalignment, and compare human brains with monkey brains & DNNs.
feilonglab.github.io
Hidden Markov Models
Speaking of HMMs, really enjoyed this paper on dynamics underlying resting state and other conditions. The idea of a baseline state from which excursions lead to more integrated states is really interesting.
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
#neuroskyence
Representation of goal activation in working memory as a function of participant motivation. According to the goal competition hypothesis, goal activation in working memory is influenced not only by cognitive control but also by the level of associated benefits. A goal with little or no benefit (neutral) will be weakly activated in working memory compared to conditions involving incentives (penalty avoidance, reward seeking, or the combination of both). It can be assumed that the combination of reward and penalty leads to stronger goal activation than penalty alone, potentially explaining the higher number of no-go errors observed in the penalty-only condition.
1/ To reduce distraction and boost focus, nothing works better than linking performance to rewards π° But what about focusing to avoid penalties? Turns out β it works tooβ¦ just not as much as combining both!
Check out our new preprint π
w/ Ed Vogel and @monicarosenb.bsky.social
Had a great time chatting with CASNL alum @sudkrc.bsky.social and sharing our recent work on arousal!
Her editing/producing skills are next-level - she somehow wrangled my scattered brain into something that actually sounds coherent...
A true miracle worker π
π #CNS2026 Young Investigator Award Winners π
Congratulations to Monica Rosenberg and Samuel D. McDougle, recipients of the 2026 Young Investigator Award! π
We look forward to their award lectures at the CNS 2026 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada! π¨π¦β¨
@cogneuronews.bsky.social
I will be recruiting πPhD studentsπ 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 π rouhanilab.com
24.10.2025 16:57 β π 92 π 80 π¬ 1 π 2A RNN with episodic memory, trained on free recall, learned the memory palace strategy -- the network developed an abstract item index code so that it can βwalk alongβ the same trajectory in the hidden state space to encode/retrieve item sequences!
Feedback appreciated!
Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw
13.10.2025 15:55 β π 54 π 18 π¬ 1 π 3New paper out! Revisiting the DMN's self-related processing from an embodied viewπ§ πͺ Huge thanks to
@choongwanwoo.bsky.social and @jeongin-lee00.bsky.social for enriching my internal model with great insights and fun discussions along the way!
Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S.
Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world.
www.nobelprize.org
Very excited to share that my first paper, with Peter Mende-Siedlecki and @leorhackel.bsky.social, is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com! βΊοΈ
Can getting more rewards make you feel more skilled, even if your performance doesn't change?
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Excited to share that I'm joining WashU in January as an Assistant Prof in Psych & Brain Sciences! π§ β¨!
I'm also recruiting grad students to start next September - come hang out with us! Details about our lab here: www.deckerlab.com
Reposts are very welcome! π Please help spread the word!
I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.
01.10.2025 22:39 β π 118 π 72 π¬ 9 π 3
1/ Why are we so easily distracted? π§ In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity β and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.
28.09.2025 19:14 β π 61 π 25 π¬ 1 π 1
New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 π§΅π§ͺ1/
23.09.2025 15:09 β π 92 π 28 π¬ 3 π 1
Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!
www.momentslab.org
This is such a well crafted study with compelling findings!ππ
17.09.2025 17:16 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
16.09.2025 12:19 β π 47 π 14 π¬ 0 π 0
π©βπ» New preprint out (FIRST one of my PhD journey) with the incredible @lindedomingo.bsky.social @ortiztudela.bsky.social @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social
"From sudden perceptual learning to enduring engrams: A representational perspective" π§
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
πExcited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses π§΅https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1
05.09.2025 16:18 β π 78 π 30 π¬ 1 π 2
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 π². 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...
check out @hayoungsong.bsky.social's new work combining RNNs, fMRI and verbal reports to study how the brain represents and retrieves causally related memories while watching a TV episode! has been super fun to be part of this!
05.09.2025 13:53 β π 12 π 1 π¬ 0 π 0Key-value memory network can learn to represent event memories by their causal relations to support event cognition!
Congrats to @hayoungsong.bsky.social on this exciting paper! So fun to be involved!
This was a huge team effort β: @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen, Janice Chen, @ycleong.bsky.social, @monicarosenb.bsky.social, ShiNung Ching, @jzacks.bsky.social
We welcome feedback!
The model watched a tv drama㪠like participants in a previous fMRI study.
From lesioning each component of the model, we found that the model learns causal structure by dissociating the representations used for memory encoding (value) and retrieval (key).
