Xinyuan Yan
PhD · Postdoctoral Researcher, Baylor College of Medicine
About
A normal person. Find science fascinating. A passerby on Earth.
For the past decade I have been learning how to do science — first through fMRI and behavioral modeling of social value learning and decision-making, and then through two postdoctoral chapters of intracranial human neuroscience. In my first postdoc at the University of Minnesota, I worked with Dr. Alexander Herman and Dr. David Darrow on iEEG signatures of value, uncertainty computation, and their relevance to psychiatry. I am now in my second postdoc at Baylor College of Medicine, working with Dr. Sameer Sheth and Dr. Ben Hayden on single-neuron recordings of human language, and concept representations.
What I hope to spend the rest of my life thinking about: how concepts are formed; how they are represented across modalities; how different languages — spoken and signed — converge on, and diverge from, a shared conceptual space; and how human and artificial intelligence might come to understand each other.
My Light
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
— Galatians 5:22–23 (ESV)
Featured Research
Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons
Cell · 2026
Single-neuron recordings from the human hippocampus reveal that semantic representations in bilinguals occupy a shared population geometry across languages — individual neurons and population codes converge on a language-independent conceptual space.
Polysemanticity in human hippocampal neurons
bioRxiv · 2026
single neurons encode multiple semantic distant concepts (polysemanticity) with the computational principle of superposition.
Distinct computational mechanisms of uncertainty processing explain opposing exploratory behaviors in anxiety and apathy
Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging · 2025
Distinct computational mechanisms underlie exploration deficits in anxiety vs. apathy. Anxiety increases sensitivity to environmental uncertainty, driving excessive exploration; apathy reduces sensitivity to reward information, causing exploitation of known options.
Neural representations of the multidimensional self in the cortical midline structures
NeuroImage · 2018, 183: 291–299
Representational similarity analysis of fMRI data showed that mPFC and PCC patterns distinguish self from others and discriminate dimensions (traits, physical attributes, social roles) of self-knowledge — suggesting distinct codes for identity-sensitive vs. dimension-sensitive self-representations.
Placebo treatment facilitates social trust and approach behavior
PNAS · 2018, 115(22): 5732–5737
The mere belief in receiving a pro-social drug increases social trust and approach behavior toward strangers — revealing how expectation shapes interpersonal behavior independent of pharmacological action.