What I study.
How the human brain encodes and decodes facial expression, how that shapes behaviour, and how reliably any of it can be measured. Four threads run through every project.
Cognitive Neuroscience
Reading the brain's response to a face.
Freie Universität Berlin · EEG, eye-tracking, and many-labs open science.
I'm Yu-Fang Yang, Ph.D. I study how the brain reads facial expression, how those signals shape behaviour, and how reliably any of it can be measured — following the response from early visual cortex to the face-selective N170 and beyond.
P100
N170
P3Face stimulus · EEG time course 0–400 ms
I
Face perception
How the brain extracts identity and diagnostic features from faces, and how those features attract the eye even when recognition is unaffected. N170, EPN, and eye-tracking fixation measures.
II
Emotion
How the brain reads emotional signals from facial features and from anticipated pain and expectation. Eye-tracking shows where attention lands, and a drift diffusion model captures how accumulating evidence under difficulty shapes behaviour and electrophysiology.
III
Social cognition
Gaze as a social signal. Direct versus averted gaze in interactive paradigms, and how those cues modulate early neural responses to exclusion and acceptance. The P3 indexes evaluation of social feedback, framed by the need-threat model of ostracism.
IV
Reproducibility
Multi-analyst and many-labs projects (EEGManyPipelines, OHBM Brainhack, ARTEM-IS) quantifying how analytic variability shapes conclusions. Preregistration and AI-assisted, transparent reporting in the methods section, as open-science ambassador at Freie Universität Berlin.