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

Event comprehension
Comprehension involves integrating ongoing events with causally related events in memory to form and update a coherent situational representation. How does the brain accomplish this? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, naturalistic behavioral experiments, and computational modeling, my work investigates various cognitive processes integral to narrative comprehension, including causal reasoning, episodic memory (stay tuned!), attentional engagement, and emotion.

Multiscale neural operation
Cognition arises from neural operations at multiple spatial scales, from individual neurons to large-scale networks. I think a lot on how neural operations at different scales collectively give rise to complex behavior, and how we can study this as a field.

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.