I am a Posdoc researcher at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, collaborating with Prof. Yanchao Bi. I completed my PhD in June 2022 at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, under the guidance of Prof. Nan Lin. My academic journey began with a BS degree from Nankai University in June 2017.

Research Interests

In my PhD, I studied semantics processing in brain by focusing on social semantics processing. Social semantics refers to the semantics related to interpersonal interactions or interpersonal relationships. The main findings are:

1. social semantics processing is associated with a highly specific set of brain regions, including the anterior and posterior temporal lobe, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate gyrus (Zhang et al., 2021,SCAN);
2. activations of these regions are sensitive social semantics processing in word-level, sentence-level and narrative-level processing (Zhang et al., 2021, SCAN; Zhang et al., 2023, BSF);
3. the left anterior and posterior portions of the temporal lobe are hypothesized to be involved in social-semantic working memory, because these two regions are sensitive only to sentences containing social semantic information, and can retain previously processed social semantic information (Zhang et al., 2023, NHB).

In my PostDoc, my studies focus on how brain learns word concepts. Human can learn the concept of a new word from very few examples, and generalize the concept from examples to new objects. For example, when a foreign friends told us that apple, banana and watermelon can all be called “Taki”, we can swiftly comprehend the reference of “Taki” and assess whether orange and potato are “Taki” or not. This efficient word learning is the cornerstone of human advanced intelligence. However, it was still unknow how our brain achieves such effective learning. My present study is to investigate the mechanism of word concept learning in brain, by constructing computational models based on brain data.

I am also interested in the following issues: 1) how people learn social concepts; 2) how learnt words or words’ relationships change existing object representations; 3) individual differences in word concept learning.