Yining Ding
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liliand.bsky.social
Yining Ding
@liliand.bsky.social
Psych PhD student in Dynamic Cognition Lab @WUSTL🧠
Reposted by Yining Ding
Aligning eye tracking and free recall time series, we found that increased saccades predict episodic (vs. non-episodic) by 0.5 s.

Just out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, led by Ryan Barker with the inimitable @drjenryan.bsky.social.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
November 24, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
proud to share this work, led by the brilliant @ilinabg.bsky.social, now out in Nature! Ilina finds that speech-sound neural processing is VERY similar in a language you know and one you don't. differences only emerge at the level of word boundaries and learnt statistical structure 🧠✨
The human brain responds to the sounds of both familiar and unfamiliar languages in a similar way, according to research in Nature. The findings might guide future approaches to language learning and rehabilitation. go.nature.com/4ppvsHb #Neuroskyence 🧪
November 20, 2025 at 7:11 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
How do changes in context influence how we organize our memories in time?

Faster contextual changes are associated with faster drift in hippocampal activity and reduced temporal clustering in recalled memories.

Elegant work led by @lindsayrait.bsky.social!

www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...
Hippocampal Drift Rate Reflects the Temporal Organization of Memories
When freely recalling past events, individuals tend to successively remember stimuli that were studied close together in time—a phenomenon known as temporal clustering. Temporal clustering is thought ...
www.jneurosci.org
November 20, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
A new preprint "Anxiety Modulates Event Segmentation" with @yaelniv.bsky.social and colleagues!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
November 20, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
Super excited to share my first preprint with Katherine Duncan and Morgan Barense (@barense.bsky.social) -- "Memory strength at reactivation, not memory age, governs prediction error driven updating of naturalistic event memory"! 🧠🎉https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/q9rkn_v1
OSF
osf.io
November 18, 2025 at 10:08 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
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, brain🧠, and AI🤖!
#sfn2025 #sfn25
November 15, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Reposted by Yining Ding
For those coming to SfN, I’ll be giving a talk showing evidence of hippocampal neuronal replay 🎞️🔁 in HUMANS as part of the “Representation of Time in the Brain” minisymposium (Wednesday morning)

Our stellar group of speakers also wrote a preview of the session in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #sfn2025
🧠
Neural Representation of Episodic Time
Inspired by recent discoveries of neural populations that track time for specific moments (time cells) and elapsed durations (temporal context and periodic time cells), this review, based on a minisym...
www.jneurosci.org
November 15, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
What makes some melodies feel "right" and others totally "off"? We have an intuitive affinity for some musical scales over others, like Bobby McFerrin shows here (youtu.be/ne6tB2KiZuk?...). Check out @omriraccah.bsky.social's paper - a clever collision of psychology and music - to learn more.
November 13, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
Excited to share that our new paper, “Predictive Looking and Predictive Looking Errors in Everyday Activities,” is now out in JEP: General! 🧠
We examined how people’s eye movements reveal both their predictions and their prediction errors while they watch everyday actions.
👇
November 12, 2025 at 9:31 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
Here's an interesting new study exploring whether LLMs are able to understand the narrative sequencing of comics and... even the best AI models are *terrible* at it for pretty much all tasks that were analyzed aclanthology.org/2025.finding...
Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Implicit Narratives in Comic Strip?
Xiaochen Wang, Heming Xia, Jialin Song, Longyu Guan, Qingxiu Dong, Rui Li, Yixin Yang, Yifan Pu, Weiyao Luo, Yiru Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui. Findings of the Association for Computatio...
aclanthology.org
November 4, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n
November 3, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting.

A neural state space for episodic memories

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪
A neural state space for episodic memories
Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories …
www.sciencedirect.com
November 3, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7
Unfolding event structure distorts subjective time
Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 29, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
We’ve recently updated our collaborative open-access book, “Neural Networks in Cognitive Science”, adding a few new authors, chapters, and lots of content.

downloads.jeffyoshimi.net/NeuralNetwor...
October 21, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
✨My first first-author paper is out✨
Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation in @natcomms.nature.com ➡️ rdcu.be/eLRm2
Big thanks to everyone ‪@isabellacwagner.bsky.social‬, @tobiasstaudigl.bsky.social, @olejensen.bsky.social, @doellerlab.bsky.social, @clauslamm.bsky.social
Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation
Nature Communications - Eye movements during scene viewing are tied to grid-like codes in the entorhinal cortex. Grid signals are specific to later remembered scenes, covary with activity in...
rdcu.be
October 20, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵
October 16, 2025 at 8:26 AM
✨✨
New eLife preprint from Tan Nguyen—Pattern-based functional MRI and computational modeling show evidence for multiple signals contributing to updating the brain's representations of events: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Multiple event segmentation mechanisms in the human brain
elifesciences.org
September 30, 2025 at 11:31 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4
Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology
Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.
www.nature.com
September 30, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
New paper alert! Work by @cogirmak.bsky.social explores the motion events in 300+ comics from around the world, revealing subtle underlying features of different types of motion cues: "Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality" www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
September 19, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
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...
Spontaneous reinstatement of episodic memories in the developing human brain
The hippocampus supports episodic memories in development, and yet how the brain stabilizes these memories determines their long-term accessibility. This study examined how episodic memories formed in...
www.biorxiv.org
September 16, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
New blog post!

Ever wonder what geom_histogram is actually doing? How about geom_boxplot?

In celebration of the release of #ggplot2 4.0.0 (ggplot8?), I explore the relationships between the “geoms” and “stats” offered by the core {ggplot2} functions.

#rstats
Exploring {ggplot2}’s Geoms and Stats – Stat’s What It’s All About
blog.msbstats.info
September 15, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

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

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇
A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events
Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...
www.biorxiv.org
September 5, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
ANSWER: 0 (yes, ZERO!)

This is a result of an analysis done by a student in my grad seminar, using a large dataset (N=307,313).

What this result might mean: Nobody's personality is truly "average," and people's personality profiles (at least Big 5) might be more "jagged" than we think.

(🧵 1/5)
Imagine you have Big 5 personality scores from over 300,000 people. You designate the scores in the "mean +/- 0.25 SDs" range for each trait (~20%) as the average range.

QUESTION: How many people in this >300K sample do you think fall in the average range for ALL 5 TRAITS?

What's your answer?
September 7, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Yining Ding
Now on CRAN, ggdiagram is a #ggplot2 extension that draws diagrams programmatically in #Rstats. Allows for precise control in how objects, labels, and equations are placed in relation to each other.
wjschne.github.io/ggdiagram/ar...
August 20, 2025 at 10:43 AM
Reposted by Yining Ding
🚪🧠 Ever wondered if walking through doors really changes your memory? At #ESCOP25 today I’m at Board 19 showing how spatiotemporal boundaries impact recall in VR. Although time matters, it’s more to do with using it effectively!
September 3, 2025 at 6:50 AM