Neuroscientist, Professor @UCLA — studying the neural basis of social behavior
Los Angeles, CA
Joined February 2019
- Tweets352
- Following205
- Followers3.8K
- Likes1K
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
Interestingly, silencing the activity of this region selectively reduced active decisions in targeted mice but elicited compensatory increases in non-manipulated partners, preserving overall group-level huddle time.
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.
Inspired by penguins huddling in the Antarctic🐧🐧🐧, we studied how groups of mice huddle together for warmth in the cold. We found that mice self-organize into huddles and form dynamic groups under cold stress. Fantastic work led by @tararaam_.
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
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
We find that specific neurons in the medial preoptic area that regulate parenting are also critical for comforting behavior toward adults. This suggests that neural systems evolved for offspring care may have provided a scaffold for broader prosocial support between adults.
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.
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
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 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.