<link>http://www.tianjiao-zhang.com/</link></image><item><title>Spatial Navigation</h1> <article> <h1>Spatial Navigation</h1> <p>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Spatial navigation is a fundamental component of everyday life. How do we know where we are? Where are we going? How do we get there? I am interested in understanding the human brain systems that enable this complex behavior. I have used fMRI and high-dimensional models to map the cortical network that mediates active navigation in a dynamic world. I will extend this line of research to understand how we represent other agents in the world, how we responds to changes in the environment, and how individual differences in navigation behavior and ability relate to functional differences in the brain.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Naturalistic Neuroimaging Methods</h1> <p>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Real-world experience emerges out of a continuous perception-cognition-action loop. Because the brain is a nonlinear system, the brain activity that underlies this loop cannot be follu engaged by classic neuroimaging paradigms with static, controlled stimuli with which participants cannot interact. Dynamic experiments require interactive closed-loop experiments that can mimic the emergent complexity of real-world experiences.</p> <p>To enable such experiments, neuroimaging requires a paradigm shift in experiment design and the infrastructure that supports it. I develop tools and methods for the nexxt generation of neuroimaging experiments that bring naturalistic interactivity into the scanner.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Dynamic Perspectives</h1> <p>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Real-world experiences are dynamic, yet most neuroimaging methods are static and marginalize out time. I am interested in developing methods to capture the dynamics of brain activity that produce continuous, naturalistic behavior.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Human-AI Interactions</h1> <p>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>AI systems are increasingly deployed in the real world as embodied agents. This opens a new frontier in human-AI interactions in which AI agents are partners and co-equals with humans in complex environments. How do humans interact with other agents, and how do we design AI agents that interact intuitively with humans? Understanding the brain systems that mediate these interactions will be key to developing more intuitive and human AI systems.</p> </article> <article> <h1>torchEDM</h1> <p>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>A fork of pyEDM for Empirical Dynamic Modelling that use PyTorch as the backend so that computations are vectorized and run on GPUs. It also adds object-oriented fitters with scikit-learn-like semantics.</p> </article> <article> <h1>CV</h1> <p>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> </article> <article> <h1>Reconstructing dynamic preferred visual experiences during naturalistic navigation</h1> <p>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> </article> <article> <h1>Visual-semantic tuning across the cortex shifts between tasks</h1> <p>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> </article> <article> <h1>It's Complicated</h1> <p>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>It’s Complicated is a guide and infrastructure for architecting interactive fMRI experiments in Unreal Engine. This forms the basis of my spatial navigation experiment, and work is in progress to provide an in-depth tutorial on how to utilize these plugins to build your own experiments.</p> </article> <article> <h1>A map of the cortical functional network mediating naturalistic navigation</h1> <p>Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>The first quantitative map of the cortical regions that are engages as people actively navigate. Active navigation engages multiple regions across the visual, parietal, and prefrontal cortices. Representations are distributed, and each region represents a complex mixture of navigation-related infromation.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Fast-Pairwise</h1> <p>Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Fast-Pairwise is a parallelized pairwise distance calculator built as a drop-in replacement for the single-threaded <code>scipy.spatial.distance.pdist</code>. It is written in C++ with Python bindings, uses AVX-512 instructions for multi-threaded computation on large 2D NumPy arrays, and supports euclidean, correlation, and random forest distances.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Voxel-based state space modeling recovers task-related cognitive states in naturalistic fMRI experiments</h1> <p>Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000</p> </article> <article> <h1>SharpEyes</h1> <p>Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>SharpEyes is a package for eyetracking video analysis and correction to generate retinotopic features. It provides a UI for finding pupils in eyetracking videos, the ability to edit the pupil locations manually to ensure data quality, and tools for making retinotopic videos and motion-energy features out of stimulus videos.</p> </article> </main></body></html>