You (Lilian) Cheng

You (Lilian) Cheng

Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive Neuroscience at UC Irvine

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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

Lead OCRUG Book Club Session on Modeling in Spark R

1 minute read

Published:

This evening, I led the session on Spark R modeling in the book club (advanced-track) of Orange County R Users Group (OCRUG). The session covered contents of chapter 4 (modeling) and chapter 5 (pipeline) of the book Mastering Spark with R. I first gave a 20 min presentation going through the sparklyr Machine Learning Library (or MLlib), the main commands in exploratory data analyses (EDA), feature engineering, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, pipeline model, and model deployment through API. Then I switched to a 1h long exercise session guiding people to build a supervised learning pipeline model step by step. All of my teaching slides and exercise materials can be found here.

Present at INP Recruitment Session

less than 1 minute read

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This morning, I presented my recent research on head direction signals in the human brain to prospective interdepartmental neuroscience program (INP) PhD students. It was a 5min short presentation with 3min Q&A. I received many interesting and diverse questions from prospective students and also learned about my colleagues’ cool research through their presentations. I hope many young and energetic ‘brains’ will join the UCI neuroscience community in the coming year!

Present at Sfn Global Connectome

1 minute read

Published:

Today, I presented my latest research on head direction signals in the human brain at the Sfn Global Connectome. At the conference, I discussed with neuroscientists who study head direction signals in rodents, macaques, and drosophila. The clues I gained from the fascinating discoveries in other species really helped me consolidate my theories on how travel direction system works in the human brain.

Receive 2020 Sfn Trainee Professional Development Award (TPDA)

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I’m glad to receive this year’s Trainee Professional Development Award (TPDA) from Society for Neuroscience (Sfn). With this award, I receive complimentary registration to attend the upcoming Sfn Global Connectome virtual event. More importantly, I will also receive access to professional development opportunities on Neuronline in the following year and get to network with other receipients who conduct cool neuroscience research!

Attend NeurIPS 2020

11 minute read

Published:

I was fortunate to attend this year’s virtual Conference on Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS 2020) thanks to the registration support from the NeurIPS 3rd Robot Learning Workshop. Although this is not a conference I’m regularly involved in, attending this conference is quite an experience filled with serendipity. (Note: part of this post is published as an article “What a cognitive psychologist learned from robotics” on the Medium Platform)

Present at Neuromatch Conference 3.0

1 minute read

Published:

Today, I talked about my research on studying travel direction using a motion adaptation paradigm at Neuromatch Conference 3.0 (nmc3). I am glad to share my research with the general neuroscience community and I appreciate the good suggestions from other neuroscientists on the next step of my research.

Won 2nd place in WaiDATATHON

2 minute read

Published:

Over the past weekend, I participated in a Datathon “WaiDATATHON For Sustainable Future” hosted by WaiACCELERATE & Women in AI (WAI). As a member of the Foodwizer team, I worked on the challenge “Recommending dishes based on personal nutrient needs”. This time, I implemented association rule mining on a recipe ingredients dataset. Through this analysis, I discovered the probability of the co-occurrence of ingredients in a recipe. And our global team (with Betty from Netherland and Kirthy from India) won the 2nd place of the Datathon!

Present at iNAV 2020

2 minute read

Published:

Today, I presented my talk “Travel Direction as a Fundamental Component of Human Navigation” at the data blitz session of the 2020 Interdisciplinary Navigation Symposium (iNAV). The study is to look at the role of travel direction in the internal representation system of human navigation using a traditional paradigm in vision neuroscience - motion adaptation. The data will be incorporated as part of the first chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation and a recording of the talk should be available on the iNAV website since next week.

news

publications

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.

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.

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.

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

Published in OSF Preprint, 2021

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: 't Hart, B. M., Achakulvisut, T., Blohm, G., Kording, K., Peters, M. A. K., Akrami, A., … Hyafil, A. (2021, February 15). Neuromatch Academy: a 3-week, online summer school in computational neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/9fp4v

research

Neural Representation of Direction in Exploration and Navigation

We show different direction classification performance in neural networks during navigation in a complex environment. We also observed a relationship between individual differences in the classification strength in each brain region and navigation performance.

Handedness in the Mental Rotation of Hands

We show that embodied experience influences spatial thinking about right hands, which might account for the presence of world knowledge variability in the mental rotation task, while also suggesting that common external experience shapes performance in spatial thinking tasks.

talks

teaching