About me

Hello! I am a neuroscience PhD candidate in the laboratory of Dr. Biyu He at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Currently, I am investigating the neural underpinnings of conscious and unconscious visual experiences, using human behavior, EEG, and fMRI, along with collaborations using deep neural networks (DNNs) to investigate the mind from a computational perspective.

Broadly speaking, the questions that fascinate me the most center around how our minds make sense of the world around us. How do we see, think, and understand? What kinds of neural processes give rise to perception and cognition, and how do they interact? My long-term research goal is to investigate how our brains integrate sensory inputs into mental models that support cognition, in part by leveraging our neural architecture’s remarkable ability to abstract and generalize information.

Previously, I was a post-baccalaureate research assistant in a laboratory of Dr. Sotiris Masmanidis at UCLA to study reward-guided learning and movement in mice, focusing on the dopaminergic system and striatal circuitry. As an undergraduate student, also at UCLA, I was a research assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Mayank Mehta, studying hippocampal place cell activity in rats as they navigated virtual reality (VR) and real-world environments.

To see a full list of publications, please visit my Google Scholar page.

You can reach me at ah5385 [at] nyu [dot] edu.

Selected publications

Hachisuka A*, Shor JD*, Liu XC*, Friedman D, Dugan P, Saez I, Panov FE, Doye W, Devinsky O, Oermann EK, He BJ. Neural and computational mechanisms underlying one-shot perceptual learning in humans. Nature Communications (2026). Link

* denotes equal contribution.

Conference talks & posters

Hachisuka, A*, Baumgarten, T*, Spector, D, Koenig, L, He BJ Probing the neural geometry of conscious object category representation in time. Society for Neuroscience, November 2025, San Diego, CA, Poster Presentation.

Hachisuka A, Shor JD, Liu XC, Oermann EK, He BJ. Mapping the invariance properties of perceptual priors in one-shot perceptual learning. VSS, May 2023, St. Pete’s Beach, Florida, Oral Presentation.