Yongling Lin
yongling.bsky.social
Yongling Lin
@yongling.bsky.social
Postdoctoral researcher in Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Cognition, and Decision-Making @UCL
Reposted by Yongling Lin
A brain injury was reported in a trial using ultrasound, framed as low-intensity TUS. Kim Butts Pauly and I reviewed the case and disagreed with how it's presented. Key acoustic data are missing.
Case: doi.org/10.1016/j.br...
Letters: www.elsa-fouragnan.com/blog | web.stanford.edu/~kimbutts/Le...
Brain Injury During Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation for Substance Use Disorder
www.sciencedirect.com
November 3, 2025 at 11:39 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.
August 28, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Join us!

Cool lab, exciting projects in social neurosicence 👩‍🏫+👥+🧠+⚡️+🇬🇧.
📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢

🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method.

Please RT

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
www.ucl.ac.uk
August 29, 2025 at 8:31 PM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
We are super excited about the first human transcranial ultrasound study from our lab which is now on BiorXiv, showing the amygdala‘s role in processing ambiguous emotions and showing TUS changed resting-state connectivity and metabolite concentrations (GABA) in the amygdala - a huge team effort! 🥳🙏🏼
Very happy to share my first preprint from @oxexppsy.bsky.social @oxneuro.bsky.social ! We (me + co-first authors @lilweb.bsky.social @mirunarascu.bsky.social + PI @mkflugge.bsky.social + many others) used transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (TUS/tFUS/LIFU) of the human amygdala ... (1/15)
August 20, 2025 at 6:45 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Perceptual Metacognition Beyond Confidence -

a little commentary piece by Tomoya Nakayama & yours truly (on @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social, Thomas von Rein, @peterkok.bsky.social, & @smfleming.bsky.social’s recent Neuron paper)

🧠📈
Perceptual metacognition beyond confidence
In this issue of Neuron, Dijkstra et al. showed that deciding whether a perceived stimulus is actually present or whether it is just one’s own imagination depends on specific signals in the fusiform g...
www.cell.com
August 11, 2025 at 6:07 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
Very proud to share this one🥹! We show that personalized signatures of brain activity are heritable and relate to the expression of specific genes. That means my brain-fingerprint is very similar to my twin brother's! #ResearchIsMeSearch🧠 🧬 ♊️
Genetic foundations of interindividual neurophysiological variability
Individual brain activity profiles are shaped by lifelong genetic influences.
www.science.org
July 24, 2025 at 8:20 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social

We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits.

The result? Not really.

A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry
doi.org/10.1038/s442...
Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health
Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...
doi.org
May 26, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
[Highlight of the Month] Murphy et al. A practical guide to transcranial ultrasonic stimulation from the IFCN-endorsed ITRUSST consortium. Clin Neurophysiol 2025;171:192-226. Open access: doi.org/10.1016/j.cl...

March 2, 2025 at 1:09 PM
Thrilled to be a co-author on this amazing work published in Nature! Grateful to be part of such a fantastic team @mkwittmann.bsky.social.
New paper from our lab now in @nature.com . We show that our brains use basis functions or "building blocks" to navigate social interactions. Rather than tracking every individual separately, social information is compressed into patterns that can be flexibly combined. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex - Nature
A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to re...
www.nature.com
March 14, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
🚨New postdoc job alert!🚨 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
...we are looking for someone with an interest in computational psychiatry and/or naturalistic neuroimaging to work on a new ERC Advanced grant "The Neurocomputational
Mechanisms of Anxiety Treatment Response (MECHANX)". (1/3)
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
www.ucl.ac.uk
February 5, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
New paper out in @pnas.org today with lovely colleagues including Hailey Trier, Nima Khalighinejad, @caro-harbison.bsky.social, @marklaubach.bsky.social, Jacquie Scholl & Matthew Rushworth (most not on BlueSky yet!) 

www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....
A distributed subcortical circuit linked to instrumental information-seeking about threat
www.pnas.org
January 16, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
Our review out in TiCS spearheaded by Mathilde Bonnefond on the latest ideas on the functional role of alpha oscillations and distractor inhibition - e.g. we highlight that alpha increases might reflect perceptual target load rather than distractor anticipation authors.elsevier.com/a/1kFXN_V1r-...
December 12, 2024 at 10:12 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
Neurons in the human brain multitask! Shared neurons fire in bursts for multiple stimuli, but their firing order shifts to create stimulus-specific sequences. A clever, dynamic way the brain encodes complex info.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Neuronal sequences in population bursts encode information in human cortex - Nature
The temporal order of neuronal firing within bursts of population spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe is dependent on the category as well as the identity of the individual stimulus, and this ...
www.nature.com
November 28, 2024 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? Check it out: 👶🧒🧑🧓🧠

with the amazing @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social @alexwiesman.bsky.social & Margot Taylor

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵(1/3)
The Lifespan Evolution of Individualized Neurophysiological Traits
How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? To address this question, we analyzed brief, task-free magnetoencephalographic recordings from over 1,000 ind...
www.biorxiv.org
November 28, 2024 at 9:42 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
Real pleasure to be part of this. State inference is clearly fundamental to learning and rl in particular so great to see this progress in terms of understanding how the hippocampus contributes. It will be great ti see if thus can explain some rl learning deficits in humans too.
Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7
Hidden state inference requires abstract contextual representations in the ventral hippocampus
The ability to use subjective, latent contextual representations to influence decision-making is crucial for everyday life. The hippocampus is hypothesized to bind together otherwise abstract combinat...
www.science.org
November 22, 2024 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
Delighted to share a new preprint with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social! We combine human psychophysics and evolutionary constraints to propose a new hypothesis about the functions of conscious vision. This has been in the pipeline a long time- exciting to get it out in the world!

osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
November 22, 2024 at 7:21 PM
Excited to share our new commentary paper discussing Ma et al.’s fascinating results on how the brains ‘smartly’ coordinate multiple predictions about other’s behavior to adapt one’s own actions! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
November 21, 2024 at 9:09 AM
Reposted by Yongling Lin
Reposted by Yongling Lin
While it’s *deeply* unfashionable to be publishing in
@elife.bsky.social right now - do humour us for advertising a study that was several years in the making (submitted way back when it was still possible for reviewers to reject us!). We’re rather proud of it.🧵👇 elifesciences.org/articles/82823
Quantifying decision-making in dynamic, continuously evolving environments
Human behaviour in a continuous decision making task adapts to the overall statistics of the sensory environment, and these adaptations are also reflected in changes in neural responses to incoming se...
elifesciences.org
October 26, 2023 at 9:39 PM