I work at the intersection of vision science and language science, and I'm interested in uncovering shared and unique neuro-cognitive computations/principles in human cognition, on the fronts of object representation, aesthetic appreciation, and memory.
Links:
Collaborators:
Ellen Lau (Maryland)
Weizhen (Zane) Xie (Maryland)
Ernst Pöppel (Munich)
Tilmann Sander (Berlin)
Yan Bao (Beijing/Munich)
Profile photo by Matthew Shi
My name is Xinchi YU, and I just got my PhD at the University of Maryland, supervised by Ellen Lau, where I was also working closely with Weizhen (Zane) Xie. This (2025) fall I will start as a postdoc researcher at CNRS Institute for Cognitive Science (Lyon, France) working with Liuba Papeo, funded by the Fyssen Foundation.
I consider myself as a very collaborative person and I really enjoy collaborating: that's where fun new ideas emerge and grow! Feel free to reach out to me if my skillset (EEG/SQUID- and OPM-MEG/eye-tracking etc.), expertise or even discussing together could benefit your work!
Name pronunciation: If you happen to speak Mandarin, you would know how to pronounce it (xīnchí; ㄒㄧㄣ ㄔˊ). But if you don't, please feel free to pronounce it as "Shinchee": as long as your pronunciation could act as a strong-enough cue to identify this specific person (namely myself), it doesn't really matter how you actually pronounce it. My family name could be easier to pronounce; if you happen to speak German or French or Finnish, it's that ü (German) or u (French) or y (Finnish) thing. By the way my family name means "at" in modern Chinese; I have no idea why my family name is a preposition but well you know that's life. 😐
My interest and training in both vision science 👀 and language science 🧏 have prompted me to work across both fields, with the goal of bringing insights of one to the other (and vice versa), since the two fields are sociologically distinct but science-wise rather relevant. A very simple demonstration is that we are comprehending the "semantics" of both linguistic and visual input. My overarching research theme is to use VISION and LANGUAGE to uncover shared and unique neuro-cognitive computations/principles in human COGNITION. Specifically, I'm now working on the following research questions:
Question 1: How domain-general are the "pointers" in our working memory?
We are of course able to hold a bunch of free-floating features in short-term memory, but we are also able to represent bound objects. Recent work has suggested that this function (i.e., feature binding) is served by pointers (or indexicals or object files) in working memory, which also solves the type-token distinction problem (see Yu & Lau, 2023). Our MEG study suggested that these pointers may be hosted in the posterior parietal cortex, and revealed novel neural markers tracking visual working memory pointers (Yu & Lau, 2025a; Yu & Lau, 2025b). We are exploring if these pointers are shared across different types of visual objects (Yu & Lau, 2024) or across visual and linguistic inputs (Yu & Lau, 2023; Yu et al., 2025), by testing whether such neural markers generalizes across tasks and source modalities. I recently published a more comprehensive outline of this research program on Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: Yu, 2025.
This research program focusing on the representation of isolated objects serves as a basis for understanding how visual or semantic relations (Yu, Li, Zhu, Tian & Lau, 2024) and associations (Yu, Thakurdesai & Xie, 2025) between objects are represented in working memory.
Question 2: Empirical aesthetics: Exploring beauty for visual and linguistic media
We can appreciate beauty from both visual (e.g., paintings) and linguistic (e.g., poems) media, what can we, as neuroscientists, say about it? My research journey with empirical aesthetics started when I was an undergraduate student with Yan Bao (Peking University) and Ernst Pöppel (LMU Munich), and I have worked on e.g., the aesthetic appreciation of poems and birdsongs, the evolution of aesthetic appreciation (Sütterlin & Yu, 2021), and cognitive entailments among "true, good, beautiful" (Yu, Pöppel, Zhan & Bao, 2024).
With deep neural networks as proxy for feedforward visual processing, we recently found support for a complementary coding for beauty via efficient coding and pattern representation (Yu et al., 2025). In the future I would be curious to explore the extent to which this observation generalizes to actual human brains, and beyond paintings (examined in this study).
Question 3: Memory for visual and linguistic media
More to come in my next career step—stay tuned!
Methodological development: OPM-MEG
I am also collaborating with Tilmann Sander (PTB Berlin) and Ernst Pöppel (LMU) on developing data-processing pipelines and exploring novel neural markers with OPM-MEG, a cutting-edge neuroimaging method (Yu+, Zhang+ et al., 2025).
You might feel that my work spans a wide range of topics, but with some unifying themes: I want my work to help different fields to talk to & offer insights to each other in interesting and meaningful ways.
🏙️Where I'm from: I was born in Northeast China, with another name of Dongbei (you might be more familiar with the geographic name Manchuria). That's a "weird" place in Asia where the signature foods include sauerkraut (made from Napa cabbage but taste exactly the same as the European ones), braised Schweinshaxe and kielbasa. I will be constantly updating this page where I would recommend musicians (and maybe beyond) from our region: Enjoy! :) I will also be blogging, as an amateur history lover, about the history and mythologies there.
👥Promoting mutual understanding beyond academia: I was a section leader of JING Forum 2017, a student forum between Peking University and the University of Tokyo, which was launched in some of the worst years of Sino-Japanese relationship. Beside Mandarin and English, I can also read and speak Japanese. I think mutual understanding is extremely important and is something that I want to promote, including and beyond across different subfields of cognitive (neuro-)science. (see my "philosophy").