Yuan Chang Leong

One of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab! We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!

1/ Our brains probably don’t store a new copy of “red” when we encounter something red. Yet we can reinstate distinct memories of red objects. How do we reuse what we already know when encoding memories? Excited to share new work led by @haoliu4391.bsky.social, with @marcelomattar.bsky.social 🧠🧵

📣 @sansmeeting.bsky.social is extending the deadline for our logo competition for the April 2027 conference in Montreal! Please submit!!! 👇🏼 👇🏼 👇🏼 👇🏼 👇🏼 👇🏼 👇🏼

Imagine two people standing in the same spot, looking at the same Goya. They inspect exactly the same parts of the painting, but in a different order. Later, they talk about what they saw. Ignoring all other differences: are the memories they formed identical?

Had so much fun presenting alongside @jeanieluo.bsky.social, @graceqmiao.bsky.social, and my co-chair Dr. Lilian Li, exploring how two brains connect and come into alignment across different social contexts! We each shared early findings from our projects - stay tuned for what's next! #SPR2026

📣 The InterGenSynchrony Dataset needs your vote this weekend! 🔗 neurojson.org/wiki/index.c... Submissions to the #fNIRS Open Dataset Contest 2026 are scored by experts (70%) and popular vote (30%). Please vote and share this post with colleagues!

The Coupled Minds Lab is recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027. Our lab studies how conversations shape the way people connect, change their minds, and learn, using fMRI hyperscanning, NLP, and computational modeling. The deadline is December 1, 2026. More info here: coupled-minds.github.io

I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle! We study how the brain perceives, remembers, and predicts naturalistic experiences like movies and games, using computational tools to analyze behavioral and neural data 🧠 App deadline is 12/2/26 - see our lab pubs on our website www.dpmlab.org/pubs.html

I'm hoping to recruit a new PhD student to join my lab at Brown (@browncopsy.bsky.social) this cycle. Applications are due Nov 15. Please apply! To read about our whole deal: levarilab.com

Medial PFC interacts with the hippocampus to retrieve context-congruent memories.. but HOW?? was what started this. Simulating mPFC-HIP🧠, we designed an RNN🤖 that retrieves memories similar in context, on top of self-attention. It learns to retrieve like humans faster! arxiv.org/abs/2609.37791

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: fantastic work by @cxue.bsky.social, Sol Markman et al who discovered a neural reason that performance suffers under cognitive load: “Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty”. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧵1/

Honored to be featured, thanks @franciscorr25.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social! It was exciting to share my vision for the lab (thesonglab.github.io) and reflect on the wisdom my mentors have passed on⭐️

Hi friends & colleagues! I’m on the hunt for a tenure-track home! I’m a BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 scholar studying learning & memory at the intersection of experimental neuroscience, theory, & machine learning/AI. I’d love to connect & would appreciate help spreading the word! web.mit.edu/hsw/www/

Our lab uses Slack to share articles we're reading. It's a kind of virtual forum. Now it's available as a searchable tagged list, with abstracts and discussion. Check it out here: torwager.github.io/canlab/jour...

Excited to share this new preprint from @lindseytepfer.bsky.social, @chujunlin.bsky.social, and me, in which we investigate the different ways our brains allow us to change our minds about people! "The neurocomputational mechanisms of naturalistic trait impression updating" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Society for Social Neuroscience! Our work examines how we learn who values us in social interactions and how our brains track these social computations My first S4SN was full of inspiring new research and new connections! #S4SN #SocialNeuro

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.

Our paper is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com! By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we found that these rich and idiosyncratic thoughts can be decoded from brain network dynamics and help explain links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior.

What mechanisms underlie health benefits of social interaction? @ryssamoffat.bsky.social @introspection.bsky.social @escross.bsky.social show that neural synchrony during a creative drawing program decreases in intergenerational dyads, increases in same-generation @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4gbafyY

We’re recruiting a full-time lab manager to join the Shared Minds Lab at USC! This will be a great opportunity for someone who wants to get hands-on experience with research before starting a PhD program in psychology or neuroscience. More below:

🔥🔥New paper alert! Super excited to share our paper, out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com, led by the wonderful Dr. Nofar Mizrachi! nature.com/articles/s41... To me, this finding fundamentally changes how we should think about the relationship between cognition and immune regulation:

Excited to share our lab's recent paper showing that direct electrical stimulation of the human amygdala enhances recognition memory for objects but not scenes. The article is open-access, and we'd love to hear your thoughts! Please share! TY to everyone involved! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

If you're still going to be at #CCN2026 on Thursday, please consider checking out @mikezhu.bsky.social's poster showing "affect-biased attention" in VLMs!

excited to be at #CCN2026! come talk to our very new lab during the poster sessions 🌱 we're introducing novel computational frameworks to model human 3D vision + developing theoretical and empirical strategies for understanding these abilities say hello & let us know what you think!

Thank you for this feature! I'm admittedly awkward on video, but I really enjoyed working on the spotlight piece and taking a bigger picture view of my research trajectory!

Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

Hi all! I’m looking for a full-time RA / lab manager (start date: late Aug or Sept, 1 year of funding guaranteed). Ideal candidate is a recent grad w/ relevant research experience. App review has begun, so if you’re interested, please apply here ASAP, by 7/12! Thx! phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf02/ats/ca...

Very excited to share this paper, led by @ajhaskins.bsky.social ! We find that how people look around the world is stable and idiosyncratic — and that these gaze patterns are shaped in part by the conceptual priorities each person brings to a scene. 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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

🌵🏜️🌵 Out now in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @rbhui.bsky.social! If your advisor sends you an unclear email, do you interpret it as good or bad? 😏😱 In a new paper, we show how people make inferences about this type of ambiguous feedback during learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Highly recommend working with @hayoungsong.bsky.social!!! Amazing scientist and person!!! Love her perspective on cognition and the brain as well!

New from our group - This longitudinal study shows 🎵 Songmaking in a group 🎵 reduces paranoia in people with schizophrenia, possibly by changing their prior beliefs about volatility osf.io/preprints/ps... huge congrats to first author Deanna Greco - a very talented graduate student - and team

In collaboration with @monicarosenb.bsky.social , we showed that individual diffs in LTM encoding is uniquely predicted by inter-electrode correlations even controlling for working memory abilities. This suggests that WM & LTM encoding are separate abilities coded by different neural signatures! 1/n

Our first foray into horror movies was recently published. Former grad student David Gregory used them as a means to study temporal memory for threatening events. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41965942/

I will be recruiting a lab manager to start in fall 2026 and will be accepting applications for Ph.D. students to start in fall 2027. For more information (& contact info), please reach out through my website: jlcrawford.netlify.app

I'll be recruiting PhD students (2027 entry) and a postdoc to join the lab at Berkeley. Interests: • continuous person perception in interactive contexts • impression management and its biases • social perception in digital spaces Get in touch if there's overlap. Very excited for this next chapter!

New work led by @whatsinertia.bsky.social, combining fear conditioning and perceptual deindividuation. Conditioned threats spread to more dissimilar Black vs. White targets- findings of interest for soc cognition as well as eyewitness identificatoin. Check it out!

🚨🚨 Job Alert! 🚨🚨 We are seeking a full-time Study Coordinator for a NIMH-funded project that aims to uncover cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying maladaptive food-choice behavior in anorexia nervosa using behavior, eye tracking, fMRI, and computational models. Pls spread the word!

Glad that we could celebrate the end of a great #SANS2026 before I caught the red-eye back to Chicago with impromptu karaoke

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Excited to share this work led by @marinewang.bsky.social where we use fNIRS to study how hand gestures help kids learn math concepts!

My first paper with @jkragel.bsky.social and Joel Voss came out yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! It’s real! :D www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Great work by @nwrim.bsky.social applying word-embedding models to Reddit and news data to show how we are affectively divided on partisan identity, but less so on contentious political issues!

Hope everyone is getting excited for #SANS2026 next week! 🧠 Quick reminder that you can still sign up for the NIH Roundtable over lunch at the main conference. Open to all attendees. First 100 signups get complimentary lunch! 🍱 More info here: t.e2ma.net/click/b2zckk...

I'm SO pleased to announce that I'll be starting as an Asst Prof at @psychiowa.bsky.social this August. The lab will focus on neural & computational mechanisms of motivation, affect, & decision-making, with the aspirational goal of translation to neuropsychiatric disorders. 🧠 yeelabneuro.com

Huge congrats to @monicarosenb.bsky.social, an amazing scientist and even better friend