Research Interests

• In general, I’m interested in the neural and computational bases of forming internal representations in human minds and how they relate to natural behaviors.

Goal-directed neural representations

Working memory can temporaly maintain and manipulate information in service of future behaviors. How do neural activities change from sensory-like to action-oriented while maintaining persistent? How do high-level task goals change neural codes in low-level visual areas? Do dynamic changes in early visual cortices reflect the computations in high-level areas?

Representational uncertainty and decision making

Internal representations are probablistic and always embeded with noise. What factors determine the representational uncertainty and how they are embeded in activities of neural populations? Whether human can subjectively be aware of the uncertainty and use it to guide decisions?

Statistical learning and predictions

Perception is a probablistic inference process. Humans learn the statistical regularities of the world and use them to guide daily behaviors without consicous awareness. How do brains implement statistical learning and make predictions? How do top-down feedback signals interact with bottom-up feedforward signals to serve these functions?

Research Methods

• 🙋‍♀️ Behavioral experiments: psychophysics, eye-tracking
• 🧠 Neuroscience: fMRI, EEG
• 💻 Computational modeling: machine learning, neural network, Bayesian modeling