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Yihan (Sophy) Xiong

Graduate Student
Research Area: Neuroscience


Neurophysiology of prediction and consciousness

Sophy received her BS in psychobiology and BA in linguistics From University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Her undergraduate research work involved novel treatments for mood disorders (under Drs. Michelle Craske and Eliza Congdon), and neurogenetics of autism using rodent models (under Drs. Daniel Geschwind and Katrina Choe). She then worked as a research assistant in addiction and emotion regulation research using human neuroimaging methods (under Dr. Hedy Kober) at Yale University. She joined the Bastos Lab in Fall 2021 pursuing her PhD in Psychology, starting her training in non-human primate research and investigating the neurophysiology of prediction in the brain. When not in lab, she can be found salsa-dancing, video-gaming, and trapeze-flying.

Representative Publications

Xiong, Y. S., Donoghue, J. A., Lundqvist, M., Mahnke, M., Major, A. J., Brown, E. N., Miller, E. K., & Bastos, A. M. (2024). Propofol-mediated loss of consciousness disrupts predictive routing and local field phase modulation of neural activity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(42).

Mendoza-Halliday, D., Major, A. J., Lee, N., Lichtenfeld, M. J., Carlson, B., Mitchell, B., Meng, P. D., Xiong, Y. S., Westerberg, J. A., Jia, X., Johnston, K. D., Selvanayagam, J., Everling, S., Maier, A., Desimone, R., Miller, E. K., & Bastos, A. M. (2024). A ubiquitous spectrolaminar motif of local field potential power across the primate cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 27(3), 547–560.

Gabhart, K. M., Xiong, Y. S., & Bastos, A. M. (2025). Predictive coding: A more cognitive process than we thought? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 29(7), 627–640.

Xiong, Y. S., Fries, P., & Bastos, A. M. (2023). Which rhythms reflect bottom-up and top-down processing? In N. Axmacher (Ed.), Intracranial eeg: A guide for cognitive neuroscientists (pp. 389–414). Springer International Publishing. 25

Xiong*, Y. S., Westerberg*, J. A., Sennesh, E., Nejat, H., Ricci, D., Durand, S., Hardcastle, B., Cabasco, H., Belski, H., Bawany, A., Gillis, R., Loeffler, H., Peene, C. R., Han, W., Nguyen, K., Ha, V., Johnson, T., Grasso, C., Young, A., ... Bastos, A. M. (2025). Hierarchical substrates of prediction in visual cortical spiking, bioarxiv.

Aizenbud, I., Audette, N., Auksztulewicz, R., Basi´nski, K., Bastos, A. M., Berry, M., Canales-Johnson, A., Choi, H., Clopath, C., Cohen, U., Costa, R. P., Filippo, R. D., Doronin, R., Errington, S. P., Gavornik, J. P., Gillon, C. J., Granier, A., Hamm, J. P., Hert¨ag, L., ... Xiong, Y. S. (2025). Neural mechanisms of predictive processing: A collaborative community experiment through the openscope program. https: //arxiv.org/abs/2504.09614

Honors

91³Ô¹ÏÍø Award for Doctoral Discovery (VADD) 2026 recipient
Vivien Casagrande Neuroscience Travel Award 2025 recipient