About Me

I am now a Ph.D. candidate (Dissertation Year Fellowship) under the supervision of Dr. Xiaoqing Hu (胡晓晴博士) at the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong (香港大学). I obtained my Bachor of Science in Psychology from East China Normal University(华东师范大学), where I worked with Prof. Xianchun Li (李先春教授) and Prof. Lin Li (李林教授) to study social cognitive neuroscience.

Currently, my research is primarily concentrated on the interconnected fields of social cognitive neuroscience, sleep, and memory-based decision making. I am particularly interested in understanding how in understanding how decision-making processes, both social and non-social, are affected by memory and its alterations, achieved through the manipulation of memories in both wakeful and sleeping states, as well as examining the relationship between social learning and sleep-based memory consolidation. Furthermore, I am delving into the intriguing transformation and updating of emotional memories, specifically emphasizing the potential with a particular emphasis on how (pro)social behavior may interact with this process.

To conduct my research, I utilize a variety of tools and methodologies, including EEG, eyetracking, mousetracking, and computational modeling. Additionally, I am eager to integrate more computational social science and neuroscience approaches into my work.

For details and my publication, please refer to Research and Publication tab.

I am interested in collaboration both personally and academically. Please feel free to reach me out via dnchen@connect.hku.hk if you have any questions, or any potential collaboration.

News

I attended Europe Sleep 2024, and presented my work on Modifying Evaluative Decision-Making During Human Sleep. This was a great opportunity to share my research , to learn more about the cutting-edge research in sleep science, and to meet with the sleep community. I am grateful for the feedback and the discussion, and enjoyed the view of the beautiful city of Seville.

Sep 27 2024

I participated in Birmingham-Leiden Summer School on Computational Social Cognition. This was a great opportunity to learn more about computational modeling opportunity. I have learned a lot from the lectures and the hands-on sessions. Many thanks to the organizers and the lecturers!

July 17 2024

Our paper Modulating social learning-induced evaluation updating during human sleep is now available at npj Science of Learning. This is my first first-authored sleep and TMR research. In this paper, we examined whether TMR can reactivate pre-sleep social learning to further influence evaluation updatings. The results showed YES, and the overnight evaluation updating was related to cue-elicited delta-theta power and N2 sleep spindle density that are related to sleep-based memory consolidation.

July 7 2024

I have been awarded for the Dissertation Year Fellowship. With this funding support, I can have an additional year to work on my research at HKU. Many thanks to my supervisor Dr. Hu for his time and support!

June 1 2024

Completed my thesis defense! Many thanks to my supervisors, my collaborators, my lab mates, and my wonderful examiners :)

April 17 2024