Bio

Yang Lin is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Andreas Tolias in the Department of Ophthalmology at Stanford University, where she joined in February 2024. She is also a member of the Enigma Project at Stanford.
Yang received her Ph.D. in 2023 from the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Tsinghua University, where she trained under Dr. Song-Hai Shi. Her doctoral work focused on cortical development, investigating how developmental neuronal origin regulates neocortical map formation and characterizing the behavior and lineage progression of neural progenitors in the mammalian cortex.
As a postdoc, Yang has made a significant transition from developmental neuroscience into systems and computational neuroscience, focusing on how the visual brain supports active, goal-directed behavior. She currently leads behavioral and electrophysiological mice experiments in the Tolias lab.

Stanford Advisors

Contact

  • Academic
    ylin24@stanford.edu
    University - Scholar Department: Ophthalmology Position: Postdoctoral Scholar

All Publications

  • Visual uncertainty and task demands shape active sensing strategies in mice. Current biology : CB Benquet, C., Sainsbury, T., Bruneau, L., Lin, Y., Cai, C., Popova, M., Ponder, K., Ntanavara, L., Froebe, R., Tan, Z., Fahey, P., Franke, K., Franco, L. M., Jones, K., Chen, Y., Keller, R., Pitkow, X., Niell, C. M., Tolias, A. S., Mathis, M. W. 2026

    Abstract

    In natural environments, animals actively sample visual information to guide their behavior. Sensory feedback is dynamic and often requires active movements, whether saccading across the lines of this page or walking through a park. From high-acuity vision in hawks to low-acuity vision in mice, many animals actively navigate to seek information, which can be called infotaxis. Although mice have relatively low-acuity vision, they still rely on sight for critical behaviors including navigation and prey capture. Yet how sensitive they are to visual information and whether they perform infotaxis has not been established. Here, we develop a virtual-reality object-discrimination task to investigate visual decision-making under naturalistic conditions. We show that mice perform infotaxis by actively seeking out informative views to guide their choices. Stimulus manipulations confirm that this strategy is modulated by the amount of available visual information. These results reveal that mice use principled active strategies to resolve visual uncertainty, thus highlighting a key role for information-seeking in natural vision.

    View details for DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2026.06.011

    View details for PubMedID 42379160