Xiaosi Gu
Professor of PsychiatryAbout
Research
Overview
Dr. Gu’s research combines computational modeling, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, and intracranial recording to address fundamental questions about the human mind. Her early contributions established the framework of interoceptive inference, showing that the insular cortex integrates bodily and emotional signals in a Bayesian fashion to generate subjective feelings. She later extended this approach to addiction, proposing a computational model of drug craving as aberrant interoceptive inference—a framework that has reshaped how researchers conceptualize craving and its neural underpinnings.
A second focus of the Gu lab is computational social neuroscience. This line of research has revealed the neural computations that support empathy, norm adaptation, and social controllability, and has more recently demonstrated distinct roles for dopamine and serotonin in social decision-making. These discoveries highlight the intricate ways in which brain circuits and neuromodulators shape social behavior, with direct implications for conditions such as depression, substance use disorder, and autism.