My name is Xinchi Yu, and I'm a fourth-year PhD student (now a "candidate") at the University of Maryland, College Park, supervised by Professor Ellen Lau. I'm in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Program, and my host department is Department of Linguistics. I am also working with Professor Weizhen (Zane) Xie in the Department of Psychology on a couple of fun projects.

My interest and training in both vision science and language science have prompted me to work on 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. Specifically, I'm now working on the following research questions:

Question 1: What is the nature of the pointer system in 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 indexes) in working memory, which also solves the type-token distinction problem (see Yu & Lau, 2023). We are exploring if these pointers are shared across different types of visual objects (Yu & Lau, 2024), across visual and conceptual representations (Yu & Lau, 2023), as well as across objects and relations between objects (Yu, Li, Zhu, Tian & Lau, 2024). 

Side project 1: How do we get to meaning/semantics from visual input?

From text or pictorial input to meaning gets through many steps. In reading, the intricate latent structures and operations that maps visual representations onto conceptual representations is what linguists call "syntax". However, despite much work on syntax as a "Platonian" formal system, we know little about its format in our brains. One prevailing dogma is that morphology (within-word structures) is qualitatively different from syntax (between-word structures). Recently, we found a similar EEG response for syntactic and "morphological" structure building (Yu, Tian & Lau, 2024), suggesting that the minimal unit of syntax may not be "words": rather, the minimal unit may be abstract morpho-syntactic units that cuts across "morpho-" and "syntax".

Side project 2: Empirical aesthetics: What can we say about beauty in our minds?

Apart from more "canonical" semantic contents, we can also extract beauty from visual input and beyond. What can we say about our aesthetic appreciation? I have been lucky to have been involved in some projects on empirical aesthetics with my previous supervisors Yan Bao (Peking University) and Ernst Pöppel (LMU Munich) and their research environment (e.g., Sütterlin & Yu, 2021; Yu, Pöppel, Zhan & Bao, 2023; Yu, Pöppel, Bao & Xie, in prep.).

You might realize that my work spans a large range of topics: I want my work to help different fields to talk to & offer insights to each other in interesting and meaningful ways.

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 something near "Shinchee". My family name is actually easier to pronounce; if you happen to speak German or French, it's that ü (German) or u (French) thing.

Where I'm from: I was born in Northeast China, with another name of Dongbei. 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! :)

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 promte, including and beyond across different subfields of cognitive (neuro-)science.