Email：[email protected]

Dr. Yu started his PhD research in the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003. During the four years of auditory research, He found that most current auditory research made the subjects as passive listeners and very few experiments were carried out when subjects actively responded to the sound. In order to bring behavior analysis to the auditory neurophysiology, He moved to Dr. Dora Angelaki’s lab in the US as a postdoc from December, 2009 to May, 2014, where cognitive function was accessed with behaving nonhuman primates. Dr. Yu was enrolled in Zhejiang University as PI in June, 2014, where he is going to merge the neurophysiologic techniques and behavior analysis in the auditory system with the topics focusing on decision making and sleep.

Research Interests:

How do the properties of a few neurons or populations of neurons relate to and perhaps account for sensory perception? The issue of decoding has received immense attention in the fields of computational neuroscience, motor prosthesis and brain-machine-interface, as well as sensory coding for perception in other physiological systems. Unfortunately, with the exception of less than a handful of studies, such concepts have seldom been applied to the auditory system. Here are our goals now:

1) To seek the neuronal correlates with the sound related decision making such as sound detection/discrimination /location.

2) To seek the origin of these correlates and the origin of the psychological limit.

3) To seek how sleep, adaptation and emotion (especially depression) affect the decision making and the neuronal mechanism underlying the effects.

Selected Publications:

1.    Yu XJ, J. David Dickman, Gregory C. DeAngelis, and Dora E. Angelaki. Neuronal thresholds and choice-related activity of otolith afferent fibers during heading perception.(2015) PNAS 112 (20): 6467-6472

2.    Yu XJ, J Dickman, Dora Angelaki. Detection thresholds of macaque otolithafferents. (2012) J Neurosci. 32(24):8306-16.

3.    Yu XJ, He SG, He JF (2009) Dorsal Thalamus modulated by Thalamic Reticular Nucleus. Nature Protocol  http://www.nature.com/protocolexchange/protocols/590

4.    Yu XJ, Xu XX, Chen X, He SG, He J. Slow recovery from excitation of thalamic reticular nucleus neurons. (2009) J Neurophysiol 101: 980-987.

5.    Yu XJ, Xu XX, He SG, He J. Change detection by thalamic reticular neurons. (2009) Nat Neurosci. Sep;12(9):1165-70.