Doyun Lee Lab
at IBS
We study how the brain encodes social information — from individual recognition to social motivation — using large-scale neural recordings and behavioral paradigms in mice.
Research Focus
An episodic memory is not a single trace but an integrated representation assembled from distinct components — where, when, what, and who — each processed by different brain systems and bound together across distributed circuits. Our central premise is that understanding memory, and the decisions it guides, requires characterizing at circuit and single-neuron resolution how these different types of information are encoded, transformed into increasingly abstract representations, and consolidated as they pass between brain regions.
Social information occupies a central position. Social animals have evolved to recognize specific individuals and remember past interactions with them — the "who" of episodic memory, arguably its most consequential yet least understood element, and one selectively disrupted in dementia and autism spectrum disorder. We develop dedicated paradigms that isolate the recognition of specific individuals and trace how social information is represented in the hippocampus, consolidated through hippocampal–prefrontal–accumbens circuits, and generalized into abstract knowledge such as familiarity. Testing the same principles in non-social domains, we treat social cognition not as an isolated specialty but as one expression of a unified question: how distributed circuits build, transform, and use memory.
Individual Recognition
How do mice recognize individuals as unique identities within social groups?
Social Motivation
Reward learning in social information processing and its link to autism spectrum disorder.
Brain-Wide Computation
Simultaneous multi-region recordings to reveal distributed social information processing.
Visual Perception
How the primary visual cortex encodes statistical features of complex visual stimuli.
Recent News
Updates from the lab.
New paper published in Nature Communications (2025)
We are excited to announce a new publication from our lab in Nature Communications!
Last Day of 2023 Summer Internship
On the last day of the 2023 IBS CCS Summer internship on a very sunny day, we took our last lab photo at a nice cafe ...
2023 Summer Internship
Hyejin Song, Min-kyung Suh, and Haeun Yeo successfully completed the 2023 IBS CCS Summer internship after their last ...
Our Lab
We are an independent research group at the Center for Memory and Glioscience, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), located in Daejeon, Korea.
Established in June 2015, our lab has developed cutting-edge techniques including freely moving whole-cell recordings and large-scale population imaging to probe the neural basis of social behavior.
June 2015
Laboratory established at the Center for Memory and Glioscience, IBS.
May 2016
First freely moving whole-cell recording achieved by team member Kyuhee Lee.
October 2019
Lab relocated to the new IBS headquarters building in Daejeon.
Affiliations
-
Center for Memory and Glioscience
Institute for Basic Science (IBS) -
Joint Graduate Programs
KAIST, UNIST, GIST, Sungkyunkwan University