Hayoung Song

Hayoung Song is a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the NCCN lab. She received her PhD in Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Chicago in 2024, postdoctoral training at the Center for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis, and joined the faculty at UT Austin as an Assistant Professor of Psychology in 2026.

The human brain is a fascinating system. It is just one among many organs in our body, yet everything we see, hear, think, and feel—all our experiences that make us who we are—is achieved by the workings of the brain. To understand human beings and our cognitive experiences and behavior, we need a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works.

The Naturalistic Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (NCCN) lab studies how brain circuits and systems give rise to cognition, with a special focus on memory and attention. We conduct naturalistic experiments during fMRI to examine brain activity in relation to behavior. We develop computational models simulating brain circuits and functions to understand the brain’s computational principles. 

Memory We study the neurobiological mechanisms by which people encode and retrieve episodic memories, and use memories to make inferences and guide behavior. We develop computational models of human memory to replicate the hippocampus-default mode network circuitry, and ask how reasoning abilities emerge from these models.

Attention Attention continuously waxes and wanes over time and across situations, and the ability to sustain attention differs drastically across people. We examine large-scale cortical states and neuromodulatory signals that give rise to these fluctuations. We also study neural dynamics in individuals who more often struggle with paying attention.