Hayoung Song

I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis. I received a PhD in Psychology (Integrative Neuroscience) from the University of Chicago, working with Monica Rosenberg and Yuan Chang Leong. I received a BA in Psychology and MS in Biomedical Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea, working with Won Mok Shim and Min-Suk Kang.

I am passionate about open and slow science practices and across-field collaborations.

Research Program

Narrative comprehension
How do we make sense of events as they unfold in our daily lives? My work asks how we comprehend narrative events by examining brain dynamics as people watch movies and listen to stories. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and naturalistic behavioral experiments, I investigate various cognitive processes integral to narrative comprehension, including causal reasoning, episodic memory, emotion, and attentional engagement.

Computational model of causal reasoning
Comprehension involves piecing together causally related events in memory to form a coherent situational representation. How does the brain accomplish this? Can we develop a computational model of the brain that achieves such complex causal reasoning? While seminal work in computational neuroscience has focused on well-parameterized, simpler cognitive tasks, my goal is to extend these models to naturalistic paradigms.

Brain operations at multiple spatial scales
Cognition arises from neural operations at multiple spatial scales, from individual neurons to large-scale networks. How do neural operations at different scales collectively give rise to complex behavior, and how can we study this as a field? Stay tuned for an opinion piece that I worked on recently with JeongJun Park and Monica Rosenberg, covering a wide range of work in behaving rodents, non-human primates, and humans!

Science and art
I entered the field to understand the neural basis of subjective experience. I wanted to explain the tingling sensation I felt as a kid in front of a beautiful painting (so-called aesthetic experience). I collaborate with artists and organizations to conduct science in the wild to investigate our subjective experiences.