About State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning

State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning

The State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning is a national research laboratory based in the Faculty of Psychology at Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China. Established in 2005, it studies how the human brain learns, remembers, decides, feels and develops, and it does so across scales that range from individual neurons and brain networks to behaviour, education and mental health. The laboratory works closely with the university's IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and many of its research groups carry both affiliations in their publications. Together, the laboratory and the institute form the core of brain science at Beijing Normal University, a university whose psychology discipline is consistently described in its own institutional histories as ranking first in China in Ministry of Education discipline evaluations.

Origins within a century of psychology at Beijing Normal University

The laboratory's roots lie in the long history of psychology at Beijing Normal University. According to the university's own account, psychology was set as a general subject for students as early as 1902, at the very beginning of the institution that became the university, and a psychological laboratory was established in 1920. A Department of Psychology followed in 1980, and in 2001 the university founded the School of Psychology, described as the first college of psychology in a Chinese university. The State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning was established in 2005, giving the discipline a national-level platform for brain research. In 2016 the School of Psychology and the School of Brain and Cognitive Sciences merged to form the Faculty of Psychology, within which the laboratory now sits. The Faculty also hosts a national science basic research and teaching personnel training base, a Ministry of Education key research base for developmental psychology, the Beijing Municipality Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, and national experimental teaching centres, so the laboratory operates inside an unusually complete ecosystem for psychological science, spanning basic neuroscience, developmental research and applied experimental work.

Mission and approach

The laboratory's stated focus, as summarised in the clean research record for this profile, is the neural basis of learning and cognition across scales, including micro- and mesoscopic brain connectomics, reward processing and episodic memory. Its method is deliberately integrative: behavioural experiments, neuroimaging and computational approaches are combined within single programmes of work. Publications from the laboratory routinely combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography and intracranial recordings with computational modelling of trial-by-trial behaviour, as in the work of Shaozheng Qin's group on stress, anxiety and decision-making, where fMRI data were modelled alongside dynamic decision computations during a working-memory task. This combination of human cognitive experiments, brain imaging and formal modelling is the laboratory's characteristic signature, distinguishing it from purely behavioural psychology on one side and purely clinical neuroscience on the other.

Brain connectomics across the lifespan

One of the laboratory's most visible research lines is the mapping of the human brain connectome and how it changes across life. In April 2025, a team led by Professor He Yong, working with collaborators, published a cover paper in Nature Neuroscience titled "Human lifespan changes in the brain's functional connectome." The study assembled task-free functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging data from 33,250 individuals, ranging from 32 weeks of postmenstrual age to 80 years, collected at 132 sites worldwide, in order to chart how functional connectivity develops, matures and declines. Work of this kind depends on large-scale data integration and standardised analysis pipelines, and it illustrates the laboratory's investment in connectomics at both micro and mesoscopic scales: understanding not only which brain regions exist, but how their patterns of connection reorganise from infancy to old age, with implications for education, ageing and the early detection of brain disorders.

Learning, memory and retrieval

Learning and memory form the second pillar implied by the laboratory's name, and its groups have produced a sustained body of work on episodic memory. In October 2021, Nature Human Behaviour published research from Shaozheng Qin's group showing that retrieval-induced rapid neural reorganisation, together with consecutive consolidation, fosters long-term retention while also shaping false memories through distinct neural pathways, extending the group's earlier work on the neurocognitive neuroscience of human emotion and memory systems and on the development of emotion-related brain circuitry. In the same period, Professor Gui Xue and his team published work in Science Advances, "Transformative neural representations support long-term episodic memory," using intracranial EEG recordings with a paradigm combining a delayed-match-to-sample task and a long-term memory cued-recall task, carried out with collaborators including Nikolai Axmacher at Ruhr University Bochum and clinicians at Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University. The study showed that neural representations of a memory change dynamically from encoding through short-term maintenance to long-term retrieval, rather than simply being reactivated unchanged. Earlier work from the same community, including a 2019 Journal of Neuroscience study on spaced learning, showed that spacing enhances episodic memory by increasing neural pattern similarity across repetitions, linking a classic educational finding directly to a measurable brain mechanism.

Language, bilingualism and the cerebellum

Language is another long-standing strength. Taomei Guo's group has used fMRI and event-related potentials to reveal the brain networks that control language during bilingual production, and in February 2022 the group published a paper in Cerebral Cortex, "The cerebellum and cognition: further evidence for its role in language control," which combined fMRI with transcranial direct current stimulation to show how the cerebellum contributes to language control in bilinguals, how cerebro-cerebellar networks are organised, and how functional neuroplasticity changes with training, neuromodulation or brain injury. The paper proposed an analytical framework for studying the cerebellum's involvement in higher cognitive functions more generally, through lateralised activation patterns, cerebro-cerebellar networks and their relationship with behaviour. For a laboratory housed in a faculty of psychology, this work matters beyond linguistics: bilingual language control is a model system for cognitive control in general, and the findings feed into wider questions about attention, executive function and learning that run through the laboratory's programme.

Emotion, stress and social cognition

A further cluster of work examines emotion and social cognition. Chao Liu's team has studied moral emotions including guilt, shame, gratitude and perceived injustice, using univariate and multivariate pattern analyses of fMRI data; a February 2022 Cerebral Cortex paper from the team showed that mortality salience — reminders of death — enhances neural activity related to guilt and shame when people recall the past. Qin's group, meanwhile, has examined how long-term stress and trait anxiety interact to affect decision computations, recruiting participants who had been preparing for at least six months for China's highly competitive National Postgraduate Entrance Exam as a naturalistic long-term stress group, and finding greater recruitment of frontoparietal and salience-network regions to maintain task performance. Research of this kind connects the laboratory's basic neuroscience to questions of mental health, educational pressure and well-being that are directly relevant to students and teachers, the population Beijing Normal University was founded to serve.

Consciousness, perception and cognitive maps

More recent results show the breadth of the laboratory's current agenda. In April 2025, Zhang Mingsha's team, collaborating with Zhao Hulin's team at the Chinese PLA General Hospital and Li Xiaoli's team, published a paper in Science showing that human high-order thalamic nuclei gate conscious perception through the thalamofrontal loop, based on simultaneous stereoelectroencephalography recordings from thalamic nuclei and prefrontal cortex while patients performed a visual consciousness task — work reported in the news section of Nature. In March 2026, Liu Yunzhe's team published a study in Cell, "Development of Non-Spatial Grid-Like Neural Codes Tracks Inference and Intelligence," collecting developmental neuroimaging data from 203 participants aged 8 to 25 and showing that grid-cell-like codes in the entorhinal cortex strengthen with age, support the formation of abstract knowledge structures, and predict improved inferential reasoning. Precision functional mapping with near-infrared spectroscopy, pursued by researchers including Haijing Niu, points in the same direction: toward an individualised, developmentally informed neuroscience that can eventually inform personalised education and clinical assessment.

People, training and place in Chinese brain science

The laboratory's publications name a wide community of principal investigators and collaborators, among them He Yong, Shaozheng Qin, Gui Xue, Taomei Guo, Chao Liu, Jing Luo, Yuejia Luo, Yunzhe Liu, Mingsha Zhang and Haijing Niu, while the clean record for this profile also notes Li Wu among the directors cited in sources on the laboratory's work. As part of a faculty that trains psychologists at undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels, the laboratory is also a training ground: graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are first authors on many of its papers, and its work is supported competitively by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, national key research programmes, and the university's own interdisciplinary and fundamental research funds. Situated in Beijing, China's densest concentration of universities and Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes, the laboratory collaborates widely — with hospitals such as Xuanwu Hospital for intracranial work, with Shenzhen University on stress research, and with international partners in Germany and the United States — while remaining, at its core, the national key laboratory through which Beijing Normal University pursues its founding question: how human beings learn, and how the brain makes that learning possible.