Yinan Cao, D.Phil.
Junior Professor
Yinan is a Junior Professor (W1, tenure track to W3) at the Institute of Psychology, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. Before joining OvGU, he was a MSCA Fellow at ENS LNC2, hosted by Valentin Wyart. He is captivated by humanity's curious talent for making what appear to be noisy and biased decisions: choices that, despite their apparent folly, may actually be smart and efficient. His lab studies how people decide what information to seek and how to use it under uncertainty, in multisensory contexts and in choices among many options (N > 2), each with diverse attributes. Using EEG and MEG, pupillometry, eye-tracking, and computational modeling, including recurrent neural networks, the lab explores how the brain samples information and allocates attention.

He completed his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in the lab of Chris Summerfield and then a postdoc at UKE with Kostis Tsetsos and Tobias H. Donner. His scientific journey has also been fortunate to be guided and supported by mentors such as Stephen McAdams, Bruno Giordano, Christoph Kayser, and Andrew Saxe.

News

  • 02/2026: My new paper on epistemic information seeking is on BioRxiv [link].
  • 11/2025: Our book chapter "Perspectives on the mechanistic underpinnings of choice biases" is out: You can read a preprint here.
  • 06/2025: I will be presenting at RLDM this year.
  • 10/2024: Settling in Paris and starting MSCA project at ENS!
  • 07/2024: New Perspective paper with Kostis on how choice biases arise in the brain!
  • 02/2024: Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship (project: DnReLU) to work with Valentin Wyart at École normale supérieure in Paris!
Selected publications

   Perspectives on the mechanistic underpinnings of choice biases
Konstantinos Tsetsos and Yinan Cao
In: Ettinger, U., Heinrichs, B., Murawski, C. (eds) Decision Making. Studies in Neuroscience, Psychology and Behavioral Economics. Springer. (2025)
[html] [preprint]

   Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain
Marcus Siems, Yinan Cao, Maryam Tohidi-Moghaddam, Tobias H. Donner and Konstantinos Tsetsos
Nature Communications (2026)
[preprint] [paper]

   Clarifying the role of an unavailable distractor in human multiattribute choice
Yinan Cao and Konstantinos Tsetsos
eLife (2022)
[html] [pdf]

   Characterizing emergent representations in a space of candidate learning rules for deep networks
Yinan Cao, Christopher Summerfield and Andrew Saxe
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (2020)
[html] [pdf] [supplemental]

MDS representational geometry    Causal inference in the multisensory brain
Yinan Cao, Christopher Summerfield, Hame Park, Bruno L. Giordano and Christoph Kayser
Neuron (2019)
[html] [pdf]
Listen to a podcast generated by notebooklm:

Contact

    The best way to reach me is via email:
    ycaoneuro [at] gmail . com

MISC.