Bo Yao - 51福利

Dr Bo Yao

Senior Lecturer

Research Overview

Research Interests

My research investigates how the brain speaks to itself through inner speech, and how language, embodied experience, and environment jointly shape human cognition. Combining behavioural experiments, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, corpus linguistics, computational modelling, and machine learning, I develop mechanistic accounts of human intelligence, one shaped not only by neural architecture, but by bodily, social, cultural, and material context.

I have developed a theoretical framework positioning inner speech as the brain's computational tool for managing uncertainty, shaping perception and action, exerting cognitive control, and sustaining self-coherence, and conduct experiments to map these functions onto their phenomenological forms and underlying neural mechanisms. Alongside this, I direct research programmes on how abstract meaning emerges from embodied interaction with the world, and on the cognitive science of reading that informs the design of human-centred technologies for literacy and accessibility. This work has been published in high-impact journals including Psychological Review, Cognition, NeuroImage, and Journal of Memory and Language, and supported by competitive awards such as the ESRC Future Research Leaders Award and the Royal Society APEX Award.

My research speaks to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI, i.e. what makes human thought distinctively biological, embodied, and situated, and how this understanding can inform mental health science, education, and technology design that empowers rather than displaces human agency.

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