People

Mingbo Cai

Lab Director

mingbo [dot] cai [at] miami [dot] edu

Mingbo Cai (蔡明博) is an Assistant Professor at Department of Psychology, University of Miami. His interest includes the computational mechanism of learning and decision making, spontaneous thoughts, brain imaging analysis method, brain-inspired machine learning, and time perception. On the topics of human and machine learning, he is especially interested in how humans or machines can learn latent structure or “generative model” of the environment without direct supervision. He started the lab at International Research Center of Neurointelligence in the University of Tokyo in 2019 and moved to UMiami in 2024. Prior to these, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Yael Niv‘s lab at Princeton University, after obtaining his Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience from Baylor College of Medicine, working with David Eagleman and Wei Ji Ma, and B.S. degrees in Electronics and Psychology from Peking University.

Yanbin Xu

PhD student

yxx744 [a] miami [dot] edu

Yanbin Xu is a second-year Ph.D. student in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division of Department of Psychology.  His current research focuses on the computational foundations of curiosity and its role in motivating active learning. He uses children’s egocentric video recordings as a lens to study their self-directed play, explore, and learn. More broadly, he seeks to understand how children efficiently learn about their physical environment and construct robust world models. Yanbin aims to design artificial systems capable of active learning that can acquire knowledge effectively even in data-limited settings.

Before joining the Cai Lab, Yanbin earned a B.A. in Neuroscience and Statistics from the University of Virginia. At UVA, he worked for two years as a research assistant with Dr. Jianhua Cang, investigating the computational mechanisms and behavioral implications of binocular integration.

Skila Zhu

PhD Student

txz460 [a] miami [dot] edu

Skila Zhu is a first-year Ph.D student in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division of Department of Psychology. She graduated from New York University in 2026.

Yu Fu

Research assistant

yxf545 [at] miami [dot] edu

Yuri holds a Master of Science in Data Science from the University of Miami and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Statistics. She specializes in statistical analysis, machine learning, data visualization, and computing. Her research focused on determining hearing thresholds from brain response data using convolutional neural networks. Currently, she works as an assistant at Cai Lab, supporting data processing tasks.

Ronald Dekker

Postdoctoral Researcher

Ron was a postdoctoral researcher in the Cai Lab in 2022-2023. His research focuses on how knowledge is represented in human and machine agents, and what consequences this has for learning and generalization. He is now at working for EY Japan as a data scientist. In his spare time, he is remotely collaborating with Mingbo Cai, Nicolas Schuck (University of Hamburg), and Quentin Huys (UCL) on the project he did at Cai Lab on decoding the semantic content and dynamics of spontaneous thought . Before coming to the Cai Lab, Ron received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Summerfield. His Ph.D. work primarily involved understanding the effects of different training schedules on learning through large-scale online studies and using neural networks as a computational model.

Wei Chen

Collaborating PhD Student

Wei Chen is a collaborating graduate student from Yotsumoto lab, The University of Tokyo. His current research focuses on the computational modelling of decision making in schizophrenia and development of reinforcement learning throughout life span. Before UTokyo, he obtained a B.E.Hons. from The University of Auckland, specialized in software engineering. At the moment, he is hosted at Yunzhe Liu‘s lab in Beijing Normal University

Aaron T. Nakamura

Research Assistant

Aaron Nakamura contributed to many projects at Cai Lab while we were at UTokyo and performed almost all the fMRI scanning. He was most actively contributing to the project on decoding spontaneous thoughts. He attended the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for his graduate education in counseling psychology after earning his Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in TESL (Teaching ESL). He has a background in working for youth at a mental health treatment center. His research focuses lie primarily in the fields of clinical, developmental, and cultural psychology. He is interested in examining the impact of Early Childhood Adversity (ECA), mainly child maltreatment, and alterations in brain structures/functions. He is also interested in investigating how people can formulate and stabilize one’s national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identity through ECA. He is also broadly interested in language acquisition. After working at Cai Lab, he is now pursuing his PhD degree at University of Hawai’i