Yinan Cao, D.Phil.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
Yinan is a cognitive neuroscientist at ENS LNC2 and a MSCA Fellow 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. He tackles this question by studying decision-making within multisensory contexts and scenarios presenting multiple options (N > 2), each teeming with diverse attributes. Using neuroimaging (mainly MEG), eye-tracking, and computational modeling, he 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.

Curriculum Vitae

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.