baby brain scientist, perception and memory and events || PhD @yale || postdoc @columbia || incoming assistant prof @cmu.edu Fall 2027 || she/her
https://tristansyates.github.io/
Tristan Yates
Woohoo!!
This is one of the coolest things the FIT’NG society does: gather a bunch of scientists in a room to discuss big questions and unsolved problems in our field. If you are attending FIT’NG (or thinking of extending your stay after ICIS…), I highly recommend signing up!
1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.
New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx
Congratulations to @lillianbehm.bsky.social, Nick Turk-Browne, and a huge team for putting together this paper (out today) on lessons from a decade of attempts to study awake infants with fMRI:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
New paper alert🚨
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Two takeaways. First, 2- to 4-year-olds can use a process called second-order correlation (SOC) learning -- e.g., A & B go together and B & C go together, then A and C go together -- in a category context to make causal inferences.
Video
Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:
Beautiful and impressive work from Cliona and team on visual development — with awake 2 month olds in the MRI scanner (!!)
My lab will study how perception and memory develop early in life — how infants and young children make sense of the world, and how those early experiences shape what they remember. Stay tuned!
With so many eyes on Pittsburgh during the NFL Draft this weekend, it feels like a fitting moment to share some personal news — I'm excited to be joining the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2027!
