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 Ellen Lau. I'm in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Program, and my host department is the Department of Linguistics. I am also working with Weizhen (Zane) Xie in the Department of Psychology on a couple of fun projects. 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/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, it's that ü (German) or u (French) 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 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. My overarching research theme is to use VISION and LANGUAGE to study shared and domain-specific computations/principles in human MEMORY. Specifically, I'm now working on the following research questions:

Question 1: What can the "pointers" in our working memory do? How are we using these "pointers"?

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 linguistic inputs (Yu & Lau, 2023), as well as across objects and relations between objects (Yu, Li, Zhu, Tian & Lau, 2024). In my future career I'm interested in doing more research on event representation.

Question 2: 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". In my future career I'm interested in doing more research on reading.

Question 3: How does meaning/semantics affect visual processing and visual memory?

I am exploring this question with Weizhen (Zane) Xie; stay tuned and fun stuff is coming very soon! :) In my future career I'm interested in doing more research on LTM-STM interactions.

Side project: 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, in press; Yu, Pöppel, Bao & Xie, in prep.).

You might realize that my work spans a wide range of topics: 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! :)

👥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.