Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Qingzhi Ruby Zeng @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social · Aug 25

/5 Very thankful for the creative feedback and teamwork from Derek Lilienthal, @coralineiordan.bsky.social, @aaronstevenwhite.io, and @elisepiazza.bsky.social throughout this wonderful endeavor! 🙏

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Qingzhi Ruby Zeng @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social · Aug 25

/4 Expert ratings were also more independent of fine-grained linguistic & structural features of stories (e.g., word surprisal, semantic similarity between sentences). Our findings suggest that experts may use different, potentially more gist-like, mechanisms when judging stories.

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Qingzhi Ruby Zeng @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social · Aug 25

/3 When rating stories across 5 dimensions (creativity, imagination, novelty, complexity, cohesiveness), experts and novices shared a 2-dimensional latent story space represented by creativity & cohesiveness, but experts viewed relationships between story dimensions as more nuanced and independent.

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Qingzhi Ruby Zeng @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social · Aug 25

/2 Then, we asked novices and creative writing experts to rate the stories on multiple dimensions and analyzed a) the structure of their rating spaces and b) the extent to which different linguistic features predicted different story dimensions.

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Qingzhi Ruby Zeng @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social · Aug 25

/1 New preprint alert! 💫“Expertise Shapes the Multidimensional Perception of Stories”! 💫 We generated a novel corpus of improvised spoken stories using diverse prompts designed to elicit creative and complex narrative structure.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

OSF

doi.org

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Elise Piazza @elisepiazza.bsky.social · Jul 30

The SoNIC Lab is in San Francisco for #CogSci2025; come check out our latest research!

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · Jul 14

For the first time, metalinguistics and recursion are not exclusively human abilities. Large language models can do them too.

This research is an example of “behavioral interpretability” of LLMs—using prompting to understand inner representations of AI.

news.berkeley.edu/2025/07/14/a...

As chatbots get smarter, humans' unique language abilities are becoming less special - Berkeley News

UC Berkeley researchers say large language models have gained "metalinguistic ability," a hallmark of human language and cognition no other animal has displayed.

news.berkeley.edu

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Jul 14

Interpersonal Cardiac Synchrony During Emotional Sharing Between Strangers: https://osf.io/nmj5k

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social · Jul 14

"Ideally, it will not only inspire neuroscientists to make their studies more 'natural' but also encourage behavioral ecologists to tackle the neural basis of fascinating behaviors."

@science.org reviews "Natural Neuroscience" by Nachum Ulanovsky: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hands holding a copy of "Natural Neuroscience: Toward a System Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors" by Nachum Ulanovsky. Along the bottom of the cover is a skyline of trees. In the background and center, a faint drawing of the brain from a birds eye view.

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Chicago Sun-Times @chicago.suntimes.com · Jul 14

Scream Club Chicago offers a safe release of bottled-up energy in weekly sessions by the lake. The breath-work practitioner says the exercise helps externalize internal tensions.

https://trib.al/ZWVNpjv

Scream Club Chicago offers a safe release of bottled-up energy

Manny Hernandez has been leading a group in weekly screaming sessions by the lake. The breath-work practitioner says the exercise helps externalize internal tensions.

trib.al

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Meow Factor @meow-factor.bsky.social · Apr 16

New mewsletter out today: what using catspeak says about us 🧪 #linguistics open.substack.com/pub/purrspec...

The Social Aspect of Catspeak

What cat-inspired language says about us

open.substack.com

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · Apr 7

The PEER2025 schedule is up! 👇

PEER Workshop @peer-workshop.bsky.social · Apr 7

PEER2025 is coming up fast (Friday, April 18)!

PEER2025 Program

Schedule of talks and activities for PEER2025

peer-workshop.github.io

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Qingzhi Ruby Zeng @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social · Apr 18

So grateful for the recognition and support!

Elise Piazza @elisepiazza.bsky.social · Apr 10

Congratulations to @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social for winning a Best Poster Award at UR's Graduate Research Day. This is actually the second time Ruby has won this award, in two different years and for two different projects. Wow!!

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Yuan Chang Leong @ycleong.bsky.social · Mar 13

Excited to be part of this work led by @hayoungsong.bsky.social! We used scrambled narratives, fMRI, and free-form verbal responses to study how the brain arrives at insights!

Hayoung Song @hayoungsong.bsky.social · Mar 13

If you are curious about the brain🧠 on causal inference, insight💡, memory retrieval, and narrative comprehension🎬, this will be the one.

work by dream team @jinke.bsky.social Rhea Madhogarhia @ycleong.bsky.social @monicarosenb.bsky.social ⭐

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Mar 13

Cortical reinstatement of causally related events sparks narrative insights by updating neural representation patterns https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.12.642853v1

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Yining Ding @liliand.bsky.social · Mar 30

Excited to share our new preprint! Using a narrative reading paradigm, we showed that temporal order memory reconstruction can depend on multiple sources of information - factors like knowledge about typical event order and hierarchical event structure can both play important roles! 📖🧠

Jeff Zacks @jzacks.bsky.social · Mar 26

New preprint from Yining Ding (@liliand.bsky.social)!
"Temporal order memory in naturalistic events is scaffolded by semantic knowledge and hierarchical event structure"
osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Jin Ke @jinke.bsky.social · Apr 17

Now out in Plos Computational Biology! We identified a generalizable neural signature of emotional arousal across contexts and individuals during movie watching.

work with the best team: @hayoungsong.bsky.social @Zihan Bai @monicarosenb.bsky.social @ycleong.bsky.social

dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Dynamic brain connectivity predicts emotional arousal during naturalistic movie-watching

Author summary This study explores how the brain represents two key dimensions of emotional experience: valence (how positive or negative an experience feels) and arousal (the level of emotional activ...

dx.plos.org

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Jadyn Park @jadynpark.bsky.social · Mar 31

Calling all couples in the Chicago area! 💕 I'm launching a new study with @ycleong.bsky.social and @lydiaemery.bsky.social to explore brain responses during conversations between couples. If you're interested, please fill out our brief screener! ssd.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Chris Baldassano @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social · Apr 10

New preprint 🎉: How do episodic memory, emotions, and schemas for caregiver experiences come together in kids’ brains and verbal recall? Check out our new results showing how past and present childhood experiences shape perception and memory for movies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Past and present caregiving experiences impact prefrontal connectivity and recall for attachment-schema narratives

We investigated how past and current caregiving experiences impacted emotional event processing by examining inter-subject functional correlation in 7- to 15-year-olds during narrative movies depictin...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · Apr 17

Very proud to finally share our latest paper "Person Knowledge is Independently Encoded by Allocentric and Egocentric Reference Frames within Separate Brain Systems," officially out at Psych Science.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Person Knowledge Is Independently Encoded by Allocentric and Egocentric Reference Frames Within Separate Brain Systems - Robert S. Chavez, Taylor D. Guthrie, Jack M. Kapustka, 2025

journals.sagepub.com

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity @tsfnc.bsky.social · Feb 28

Join us on May 21 for AI, Creativity & a Changing World, a special symposium on the latest in Creativity & AI research:
🔹 AI & Human Co-Creativity
🔹 Advances in Automated Creativity Scoring
🔹 Expert panel on future trends led by @roger-beaty.bsky.social

Registration opens next week!
#SfNC2025

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

simoneluchini.bsky.social @simoneluchini.bsky.social · Apr 8

Enhancing creativity through neurofeedback:
Check out our recent paper where we use covert neurofeedback to entrain default-executive coupling during creative thinking!

Xinbing (Jack) Zhang, Jack White, Michael Luehrs, Michal Ramot, & @roger-beaty.bsky.social

t.co/glnpPNmJ6R

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Coraline Rinn Iordan @coralineiordan.bsky.social · Dec 4

New paper story time (now out in PNAS)! We developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at individual objects in those categories.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Sculpting new visual categories into the human brain | PNAS

Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report an alternate route for humans to a...

www.pnas.org

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Reposted by Qingzhi Ruby Zeng

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · Sep 15

List of psychology-related starter packs!
#Psychology #AcademicSky 🧪 🧵

Cross-Cultural Psychology and Quant Anthropology
by @drboothroyd.bsky.social

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Qingzhi Ruby Zeng @qingzhirubyzeng.bsky.social · Nov 22

Excited to attend my first in-person conference since the pandemic! Stop by my poster (5097) to chat about speech, prosody, and social interactions. And don’t miss the other amazing posters from my lab too! #psynom24

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Elise Piazza @elisepiazza.bsky.social · Nov 21

Our lab has a new #musiccognition preprint out! This is a comprehensive look at how listeners integrate musical context across multiple timescales to complete a diverse array of tasks: memory, prediction, and event segmentation. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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