Publications

(Don’t) look where you’re going: Evidence for a travel direction signal in humans that is independent of head direction

Published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2023

We often assume that travel direction is redundant with head direction, but from first principles these two factors provide differing spatial information. Although head direction has been found to be a fundamental component of human navigation, it is unclear how self-motion signals for travel direction contribute to forming a travel trajectory. Employing a novel motion adaptation paradigm from visual neuroscience designed to preclude a contribution of head direction, we found high-level aftereffects of perceived travel direction, indicating that travel direction is a fundamental component of human navigation.

Recommended citation: Cheng, Y., Ling, S., Stern, C. E., Huang, A., & Chrastil, E. R. (2023). (Don’t) look where you’re going: Evidence for a travel direction signal in humans that is independent of head direction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (in press).

Navigational systems in the human brain dynamically code for past, present, and future trajectories.

Published in bioRxiv, 2023

Navigational trajectory planning requires the interaction of systems that include spatial orientation and memory. Here, we used a complex navigation task paired with fMRI pattern classification to examine head and travel direction tuning throughout the human brain. Rather than a single, static network, we report multiple simultaneous subnetworks that 1) have strong connections with both allocentric (world-centered) and egocentric (viewer-centered) movement trajectories, 2) change during the course of exploration, 3) code for past and future movements as well as the present direction, and 4) are strongest for individuals who convert their trajectories into egocentric movements once they have learned the environment. These findings shift our understanding of the neural processes underlying navigation from static structure-function relationships to a dynamic understanding of the multiple brain networks that support active navigation. The insights into the nature of individual navigation abilities uncovered here challenge the dominant framework of largely allocentric coding for successful navigation in complex environments, and replace this with a new framework that relies on multiple co-existing dynamic computations.

Recommended citation: Cheng, Y., Ling, S., Stern, C. E., & Chrastil, E. R. (2023). Navigational systems in the human brain dynamically code for past, present, and future trajectories. bioRxiv.

Robust machine learning segmentation for large-scale analysis of heterogeneous clinical brain MRI datasets

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023

SynthSeg+ is an image segmentation tool for automated analysis of highly heterogeneous brain MRI clinical scans. Our method relies on a new strategy to train deep neural networks, such that it can robustly analyze scans of any contrast and resolution without retraining, which was previously impossible. Moreover, SynthSeg+ enables scalable quality control of the produced results by automatic detection of faulty segmentations. Our tool is publicly available with FreeSurfer and can be used “out-of-the-box”, which facilitates its use and enhances reproducibility. By unlocking the analysis of heterogeneous clinical data, SynthSeg+ has the potential to transform neuroimaging studies, given the considerable abundance of clinical scans compared to the size of datasets used in research.

Recommended citation: Billot, B., Magdamo, C., Cheng, Y., Arnold, S. E., Das, S., & Iglesias, J. E. (2023). Robust machine learning segmentation for large-scale analysis of heterogeneous clinical brain MRI datasets. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(9), e2216399120.

Who believes they are good navigators? A machine learning pipeline highlights the impact of gender, commuting time, and education

Published in Machine Learning with Applications, 2022

We introduce a novel ML pipeline and demonstrate its potential on a large-scale digital dataset, Sea Hero Quest, a mobile game with data from nearly 770,000 players (ages 19 to 70, men N = 404,455, women N = 367,173). We analyzed how demographics are related to self-reported navigation ability using exploratory analysis, supervised and unsupervised learning.

Recommended citation: Cheng, Y., He, C., Hegarty, M., & Chrastil, E. R. (2022). Who believes they are good navigators? A machine learning pipeline highlights the impact of gender, commuting time, and education. Machine Learning with Applications, 100419.

Neuromatch Academy: a 3-week, online summer school in computational neuroscience

Published in Journal of Open Source Education, 2022

Neuromatch Academy was designed as an online summer school to cover the basics of computational neuroscience in three weeks. The materials cover dominant and emerging computational neuroscience tools, how they complement one another, and specifically focus on how they can help us to better understand how the brain functions.

Recommended citation: Hart, B., Achakulvisut, T., Adeyemi, A., Akrami, A., Alicea, B., Alonso-Andres, A., ... & Vishne, G. (2022). Neuromatch Academy: a 3-week, online summer school in computational neuroscience. Journal of Open Source Education, 5(49).

From individual cognitive maps to a collective cognitive map: prescriptive guidelines and measurement of factors that could distort the mapping process

Published in PsyArXiv, 2021

In the collective navigation scenario of a trio exploring in a foreign city, we propose a theoretical piece, which is a prescriptive guideline describing rational ways that can enable the trio to form a collective cognitive map. The guidelines center around three stages of exploration: the initial gathering of information, coming together to plan a route in the new city, and executing the exploration plan. Depending on the desires and goals of the group, they might explore together for some or all of the time, splitting up only when their individual goals diverge. The guidelines suggest an optimal plan for these different possibilities.

Recommended citation: Cheng, Y., & Chrastil, L. (2021, November 30). From Individual Cognitive Maps to a Collective Cognitive Map: Prescriptive Guidelines and Measurement of Factors that Could Distort the Mapping Process. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7ygk2

Telling right from right: the influence of handedness in the mental rotation of hands

Published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2020

Our findings demonstrate that embodied experience influences spatial thinking about right hands, which might account for the presence of world knowledge variability in MRT, while also suggesting that common external experience shapes performance in spatial thinking tasks. These findings demonstrate that investigations in spatial thinking tasks might overlook the nuances reflecting world knowledge versus embodied experience if researchers do not recruit left-handers.

Recommended citation: Cheng, Y., Hegarty, M., & Chrastil, E. R. (2020). Telling right from right: the influence of handedness in the mental rotation of hands. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5, 1-18.

The effect of altruistic tendency on fairness in third-party punishment

Published in Frontiers in Psychology, 2015

In third-party punishment, the altruistic tendency effect influences fairness consideration in the early stage of evaluation. Moreover, the results provide further neuroscience evidence for inequity aversion.

Recommended citation: Sun, L., Tan, P. *, Cheng, Y. *, Chen, J., & Qu, C. (2015). The effect of altruistic tendency on fairness in third-party punishment. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 820.

The processing course of conflicts in third‐party punishment: An event‐related potential study

Published in PsyCh Journal, 2014

In third-party punishment, people encountered more conflict when they did not change unfair offers. Furthermore, it was implied that altruistic punishment, rather than rational utilitarianism, might be the prepotent tendency for humans that is involved in the early stage of decision-making.

Recommended citation: Qu, L., Dou, W., Cheng, Y., & Qu, C. (2014). The processing course of conflicts in third‐party punishment: An event‐related potential study. PsyCh Journal, 3(3), 214-221.

You (Lilian) Cheng

Publications