Hi! I am a postdoctoral researcher working with Daniel Dilks at Emory University.

How do we make sense of the world around us and find our way through them? My research investigates human spatial cognition, from recognizing places and navigating our immediate surroundings to building knowledge of the broader spatial world. I study how the brain supports these abilities and how the underlying neural systems emerge and develop from infancy through adulthood.

I combine behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and computational analyses to address these questions across the lifespan.

Selected Publications

Jung, Y., & Dilks, D. D. (in press). A fine-grained cortical blueprint for three scene systems in newborns. Nature Communications.

Jung, Y., & Dilks, D. D. (2025). Early development of navigationally relevant location information in retrosplenial complex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 122, e2503569122.

Jung, Y., Hsu, D., & Dilks, D. D. (2024). “Walking selectivity” in the occipital place area in 8-year-olds, not 5-year-olds. Cerebral Cortex, 34(3). bhae101.

Jung, Y., & Walther, D. B. (2021), Task dependence of neural representations of global scene properties but not scene categories in the prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience.

Jung, Y., Walther, D. B. & Finn, A. S. (2020), Automatic categorical abstraction during visual statistical learning in adults and children. Developmental Science, e13072.

Jung, Y., Larsen, B., & Walther, D. B. (2018). Modality-independent coding of scene categories in prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 38(26):5969-5981.

CV

To check out my CV, click here.

Education

PhD — Psychology  August, 2019
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada (advisors: Dirk Bernhardt-Walther & Amy Finn)

MSc — Cognitive Science  August, 2013
Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea (advisor: Sang Chul Chong)

BA — Psychology  February, 2011
Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea (advisor: Sang Chul Chong)

Professional Appointments

Postdoctoral Researcher  December, 2019
Princeton University (advisor: Lauren Emberson)

Postdoctoral Researcher  August, 2021
Emory University (advisor: Daniel Dilks)

Selected Awards

Ontario Trillium Scholarship  2014-2018
Vision Science Society, Student Travel Award   2016
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN), Student Travel Award  2017

Get In Touch

Please feel free to reach out if you have any quesitons or want to learn more about my research!