Ziyao Zhang

How do we regroup and resume goal directed behaviors when distractions pull us away from our plans? In a snake game inspired memory task, we found people flexibly replan after distraction, but this flexibility was constrained, worked for only one item in memory. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Our review of Bayesian efficient coding as a theory of perception is out now in TICS – with @ivntmc.bsky.social and Máté Lengyel. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

1/10 🧠 Imagine seeing a cute dog before it runs away. A few seconds later, your friend tells you this was a Corgi. To remember this experience later, your brain has to link the dog (who is now out of sight) with the name you just heard.

Do brain connections just carry information between regions, or do they transform it? Lab's latest is out in Nature Neuroscience, led by Lakshman Chakravarthula: "Network geometry shapes the transformation of task representations across the human cortex" www.colelab.org/pubs/Chakrav... 1/n

A Mechanistic Theory Unifying Value and Schema in the Prefrontal Cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.17.759791v1

New preprint out (first from my new group!) 🚨 "Predictive Grid Cell Coding Does Not Require Explicit Planning" biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

How does juggling multiple thoughts affect long term memory? check this out!

What kind of dynamics underlie sequence working memory? In the last project of my PhD we developed and analysed RNNs fitted to multi-session single-unit data of macaques. Now out on: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @jakhmack.bsky.social and data from Chen et al., Neuron 2024. [1/4]

Really chuffed about this one. It's impt for our efforts to understand neural and computational bases of controlling the contents of WM. It also highlights a control-related signal in the beta band that is NOT "inhibitory" in the way often assumed doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

a fun collaboration with yanni and the self-regulation lab. We tested neural distinctions between anticipating social and monetary reward in a large sample study

2 yrs ago, I briefly laid out a new theory of how motivation works (AGH). Here, I expand on the problems AGH was trying to solve, why they are hard to solve, what my solution looks like, and how this should change our understanding of thoughts & actions. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵A few highlights:

There are 2 tenure-track searches happening at UT Austin Psychology @utaustin.bsky.social! Dev/Social: apply.interfolio.com/194041 Clinical: apply.interfolio.com/194045 Please apply and be my colleague! Austin is awesome, UT is awesome, and the department is awesome⭐

Recruiting a new PhD student to start Fall 2027. Research would focus on Visual Working Memory, possibly with a developmental approach (but not necessarily). Check out my lab website where the are links to the application and contact info if you have questions. rickermemorylab.com

Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience! Encoding models fit 28,134 features to fMRI from a virtual taxi-driving task, revealing 11 distinct cortical regions that transform perception into action. Read the preprint. gallantlab.org

PREPRINT UPDATE🥳👇: 🧠learning under uncertainty & metacognitive processes are not as generalizable as previously thought! both evolve differently depending on structure & stimulus set osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper from the Neurosurgery Research Team at BCM! “Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze” led by @assiachericoni.bsky.social! 🧵 www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Hey, we’ve been studying mnemonic chunking in🐒! With @fkchiang89.bsky.social Here’s the rundown: 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

How does the brain track an object even when it is occluded and in constrained, non-linear motion? 👁️🧠 In a new preprint, we use EEG+behavior to study how we mentally track motion (w/ @dkaiserlab.bsky.social, @luchunyeh.bsky.social, @kathadobs.bsky.social,...) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/5 🧵

Our task-switching paper is now out at Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol... We find that that our brains reset to a task-neutral state between trials, providing flexibility when the upcoming task is uncertain. RNNs also learn this strategy, but only when trained to switch tasks.

Excited about a new paper (w @russellepstein.bsky.social): "Cognitive maps as a medium for thought", in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! We discuss how maps are an important 'middle ground' rep. medium, and how they may interact with a 'language of thought'. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper from the BCM Neurosurgery research team! "Neural basis of compositional control" led by @assiachericoni.bsky.social and @justfineneuro.bsky.social ! 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New Preprint Alert! With @jasonleng.bsky.social @ashenhav.bsky.social @shenhavlab.bsky.social “Characterizing the causes, dynamics, and consequences of choice deferral” osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵🧵🧵

github.com/harrisonritz...

Our paper is out in @natmachintell.nature.com! We trained multiple RNNs to perform free recall. The best-performing ones learned a strategy akin to the memory palace technique. See thread below for more info. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Excited to be presenting @wmsymposium.bsky.social tomorrow, July 16 at 11:45am CDT! I’ll be sharing my recent work where we provide evidence for a revised model of memory control, in which multiple distinct mechanisms support the regulation of intrusive thoughts. Hope to see you there!

After five years in the US 🇺🇸, I'll soon be returning to my hometown of Strasbourg, where I'll join INSERM as a tenure-track Junior Group Leader and launch the MInD (Motivation, Inattention & Distraction) Research Group. 🇫🇷🇪🇺 Two graduate positions available: matthieuchidharom.wixsite.com/mind

As of today, I'm officially an Assistant Professor at the University of California Davis! I'm so excited to be joining the Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain, and I'm looking forward to getting settled into the new lab and embarking on a lot of fun new research this year

ATTENTION!!! The program of Working Memory Symposium (WMS) 2026 (July 14-17) is out! sites.google.com/view/wmsympo... This year, WMS will feature a single stream presentation of 52 talks (39 talks and 13 blitz) + 1 panel discussion across 4 days. Looking forward to seeing you all!!!

Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student, funded by a new ERC grant. The grant focuses on the role of the hippocampus in visual perception, using 7T fMRI (hippocampal subfields, cortical layers) and MEG+iEEG. The intended start dates for both positions are in early 2027. 🧠🟦 1/3

Online Now: Looking into working memory through micro eye movements

New preprint alert! doi.org/10.64898/202... Throughout life, we are often told to persist in the pursuit of our long term goals. However, the most important factor to consider in the real world for whether to continue pursuit or abandon one's goal is knowing how much progress you are making.

I am looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join my lab at Sabancı University in Istanbul for a 2-year TÜBİTAK-funded position, with possible extension. Interested candidates can email me with a CV and a brief note about their research interests. More details on gunselilab.com soon.

We make flexible choices in new situations by knitting together information from separate relevant memories. But what governs which memories are retrieved and when? In a new preprint, we captured how people build decision variables from different memories by tracking their gaze on a blank screen.

This work is now published in Nature Communications! We were able to train participants to have near-perfect memory for lists of 40 words - they added creative details to their memory representations that we could measure in their behavior and brains 🧠 doi.org/10.1038/s414...

We gave a tutorial on @nwb.org and DANDI at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social this year. If you couldn't make it (or want a refresher), the full recording is up on YouTube. Covers everything from data standardization to finding and reusing public neurophysiology datasets on DANDI.

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Thrilled to publish this in @thetransmitter.bsky.social - such a thoughtful platform for the conversations neuroscience needs to be having about AI, open science, and the future of our field.

Postdoc position available at postlab.psych.wisc.edu. Pls send cv to postle@wisc.edu

The Naturalistic Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab is launching at UT Austin and is looking for founding members at all levels, including lab manager, PhD students, and postdocs! #NeuroJobs We will study human brain🧠 and memory & attention, using fMRI and modeling. thesonglab.github.io

New preprint! 🚨 Work w/ Sangita Dandekar & Clayton Curtis at NYU during my PhD. We show how prefrontal & visual cortices coordinate to keep working memories alive via localized & long-range β-band dynamics. 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/5)

🎉New paper out today in Nature Reviews Psychology🎉 with @mjdahl.bsky.social, @mariamaly.bsky.social, and @thiasmittner.bsky.social. We've been working on a unified framework for attentional states and the dynamics of transitions between them. 🧵

New review with Cheng Xue at U Chicago @cxue.bsky.social in Trends Neurosci@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social! We discuss the neural geometry of task-dependent computation: disentangled encoding, RNN modeling, switch cost, etc. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Abstract and Concrete Working Memory Information in Human Visual Cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.23.727368v1

Now out in Current Opinion in Neurobiology! We propose that biases in perception & memory emerge naturally from an adaptive, hierarchical human learning system. w/ @timbrady.bsky.social + sky-less et al. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Announcing: a new interactive online tool for a quick and simple start of encoding or encoding: 🧠 fMRI, EEG, MEG, iEEG, spikes… preprocessing 💬 text 🔊 audio ▶️ video 🏞️ image… embeddings 📦 pip install neuralset 🔍https://facebookresearch.github.io/neuroai/neuralset/index.html

@wmsymposium.bsky.social 📢 📢 📢 ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS OPEN 📢 📢 📢 The #workingmemory Symposium will be held online July 14-17, 2026. 🥳 🎤🎤🎤Talks will be either a standard 12-minute length (with 3 minutes for Q&A), or a 3-minute data "blitz" style presentation. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I am thrilled to share that I will be joining the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at CU Boulder in January 2027, where I'll be starting the Affective Learning and Translational Memory (AltMem) Lab. I am also recruiting PhD students in the upcoming cycle (starting fall 2027)! altmemlab.org