Wei Ji Ma

Professor of Neural Science and Psychology

Education

  • 1996-2001 PhD, University of Groningen (2001)

AREAS OF INTEREST

Decision-making, planning, reinforcement learning, social cognition, working memory, neural networks, perception.

Research Overview

Wei Ji Ma is Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU. His lab studies decision-making in planning, social cognition, working memory, perception, and attention, using a combination of human behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and - through collaborations - electrophysiology and neuroimaging. Wei Ji grew up in the Netherlands and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Groningen. He continued as a postdoc in computational neuroscience, first with Christof Koch at Caltech and then with Alexandre Pouget at the University of Rochester. He was Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine from 2008 to 2013. He has been at NYU since 2013. He has affiliate appointments in the Neuroscience Institute, the Institute for the Study of Decision Making, the Center for Data Science, and the Center for Experimental Social Science, and is Collaborating Faculty of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai. With Xiao-Jing Wang, Wei Ji is Program Director of the NIH-funded Training Program in Computational Neuroscience at NYU. Moreover, Wei Ji is active in mentorship, community-building, and outreach. He is a founding member of the Scientist Action and Advocacy Network and of NeuWrite NYU. Wei Ji co-founded and leads the Growing up in Science seminar series, in which scientists tell their "unofficial stories". Read or listen to Wei Ji's own unofficial story. Besides his academic work, Wei Ji is the co-founder of the Rural China Education Foundation. 

 

 

Representative publications

 

Edgar Y Walker, R James Cotton, Wei Ji Ma, Andreas S. Tolias (2020),
A neural code for probabilistic computation in visual cortex
Nature Neuroscience 23, 122-129. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0554-5

Hsin-Hung Li, Wei Ji Ma (2020),
Confidence reports in decision-making with multiple alternatives violates the Bayesian confidence hypothesis
Nature Communications  11, article number 2004. DOI:  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15581-6

Wei Ji Ma (2019),
Bayesian decision models: a primer
Neuron  104,(1): 164-175. DOI:  https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30840-2

Mingyu Song, Zahy Bnaya, Wei Ji Ma (2019),
Sources of suboptimality in a minimalistic explore-exploit task
Nature Human Behaviour 3, 361-368. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0526-x
PDF | Code (Github) 

A Emin Orhan, Wei Ji Ma (2019),
A diverse range of factors affect the nature of neural representations underlying short-term memory.
Nature Neuroscience 22, 275-283. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-018-0314-y
PDF | Code (Github) 

Van den Berg R, Ma WJ (2018),
A resource-rational theory of set size effects in visual working memory, 
eLife 7: e34963. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.34963 
PDF | Data and Code 

Van Opheusden B, Galbiati G, Bnaya Z, Li Y, Ma WJ (2017),
A computational model for decision tree search.
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1254-1259.
PDF | Website to try out the experiments and explore the data

Orhan AE, Ma WJ (2017),
Efficient probabilistic inference in generic neural networks trained with non-probabilistic feedback.
Nature Communications 8, 138. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00181-8
PDF | Code

 

 

View my complete list of publications.