Neuroscientist, Professor @UCLA — studying the neural basis of social behavior
Los Angeles, CA
Joined February 2019
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Excited to share our latest work in @Nature showing shared neural substrates for parenting and prosocial helping behavior - fantastic work by @Fangmiao4, @KaylaYingYan, and Emily Wu. Full text available here: rdcu.be/e6PnY
Weizhe Hong retweeted
If you are going to the SfN meeting in DC (@SfNtweets) and are interested in social neuroscience, please join us for the Social Neuroscience Social (11/16/2026). @S4SNeuro
Hosted by the four of us: Me, @TheHongLab, Ziv Williams, @DrNancyPadilla
Weizhe Hong retweeted
My new Extrospection #blog at @PsychToday is live!
We explore how social interaction is the "dark matter" of #AI. Not a feature but a constitutive condition!
New #NeuroAI work from @TheHongLab & @KanakaRajanPhD shows why...
🔗psychologytoday.com/us/blog/…
Weizhe Hong retweeted
The idea that prosocial behavior repurposes parenting circuits has been around for a while & was deeply explored in @pschurchland (my mum!)'s book Conscience. Now @TheHongLab has the mechanistic proof in a stunning new Nature paper. The right idea finally meets the right tools.🧠
Why do we help strangers in distress? A new paper from @TheHongLab's lab at @dgsomucla finds that the brain circuit underlying parenting & the one driving prosocial helping behavior are the same. The neural systems that evolved to care for vulnerable offspring may be the very foundation of human empathy. This is the kind of discovery that could only come from fundamental research, and it is happening right here at UCLA. 🧠nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Weizhe Hong retweeted
Symposium submissions are due tomorrow, March 31, 2026!
Symposium Proposal Deadline Extended!
2026 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Neuroscience (S4SN 2026) will take place in Montréal, Canada, August 23–26, 2026
The deadline for symposium proposals has been extended to Tuesday, March 31
Learn more: s4sn.org/s4sn2026
We often think of survival as an individual act. But when facing hardship together, social groups may function more like a unified system than a collection of separate individuals
Excited to share our latest work @NatureNeuro on collective social dynamics
rdcu.be/e8LrV
At the neural level, we found that the prefrontal cortex tracks not just an individual's own choices, but also those made by its social partners, suggesting the brain continuously models others to enable coordinated group behavior.
Weizhe Hong retweeted
Symposium Proposal Deadline Extended!
2026 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Neuroscience (S4SN 2026) will take place in Montréal, Canada, August 23–26, 2026
The deadline for symposium proposals has been extended to Tuesday, March 31
Learn more: s4sn.org/s4sn2026
While prosocial helping behavior is hypothesized to have an evolutionary root in caring for vulnerable newborn offspring, whether the neural substrates underlying parenting may contribute to adult-directed prosocial helping behaviors remains largely unclear.
Join us in beautiful Montreal for the 2026 S4SN Conference (Aug 23–26)!
Share your latest research, spark new collaborations, and engage with a vibrant social neuroscience community!
Symposium proposals and individual abstract submissions are underway: event.fourwaves.com/s4sn2026…
We’re excited to share our latest review article (with @JanineJiang22 and @stevewcchang) synthesizing current insights into the behavioral manifestations and neural basis of cooperative behavior: authors.elsevier.com/a/1meNt…
We are excited to share our latest work in @ScienceMagazine studying cooperative behavior in both biological and artificial intelligence systems — fantastic work by @JanineJiang22, Linfan Gu, and wonderful collaboration with @JonathanCKao! science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
We identified key social behavioral strategies and decision-making processes in mice that facilitate successful cooperation. We found that these processes are represented at both single-cell and population levels in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and demonstrated a causal role for ACC activity in cooperation.
We extended our findings to artificial intelligence systems by training artificial agents in a similar cooperation task using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). The agents developed behavioral strategies and neural representations reminiscent of those observed in the biological brain, revealing parallels between cooperative behavior in biological and artificial systems.
Thrilled to share our latest work in @Nature studying inter-brain neural dynamics in both biological and artificial intelligence systems — amazing work by @xzh_brain, Nguyen Phi, and fantastic collaboration with @JonathanCKao! Read the full article here: rdcu.be/euu5Z
We extended this framework to artificial intelligence agents and observed that, as social interactions emerged, so too did shared neural dynamics between interacting agents. Importantly, selectively disrupting the neural components that contribute to shared neural dynamics substantially reduces the agents’ social actions.