Yanchao Bi

Biography

Yanchao Bi is a Boya professor in School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Institute for Artificial Intelligence, at Peking University. She received her PhD from the Department of Psychology, Harvard University, working on the cognitive process of language production in the laboratory of Dr. Alfonso Caramazza. In 2006 she established her laboratory at Beijing Normal University and moved to Peking University in 2024. Her lab focuses on the study of functional and neural architecture associated with semantic memory, knowledge representation, and language processing, using cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, multi-modal neuroimaging, computation modeling and other research methods.  

Talk: "Perception, language, and knowledge representation in the human brain"

Human brain stores tremendous amount of knowledge  about this world, which  is the foundation of object recognition, language, thought, and reasoning. What’s the neural  codes of semantic knowledge  representation? Is the knowledge “roses  are red” simply the memory trace of perceiving the color of roses, stored in the brain circuits within color-sensitive  neural systems? What  about knowledge that  is not directly perceived by senses, such as “freedom” or “rationality”? I will present a set of studies from my lab that  addresses this issue, including object color (and othervisual) knowledge in several  populations (congenitally blind humans, color blind humans, and typically developed macaques), and semantic neural representation in individuals with early language experience deprivation. The findings point to the existence of two  different  types of knowledge coding in different regions of the human brain – one conservative, based on sensory experiences, and one based on language-derived machinery that support fully nonsensory information, with the latter further modulating the former. 

More information

Yanchao Bi's concept Lab