About Me
I am Ze Fu (付泽).I am curious about how people make sense of the world using their internal mental models - the knowledge, beliefs and cultural products obtained through both biological and cultural evolution processes. To explore this, I combine insights and methods from different research fields like cognitive neuroscience, cultural evolution, and human behavioral ecology.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure – PSL (Paris), working with Nicolas Baumard. I completed my Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at Beijing Normal University, advised by Yanchao Bi. Here is my CV.
Outside work, I enjoy films, literature, running, and long conversations while walking. I like all forms of stories—one of the most remarkable human inventions.
Research Focus
This line of work was developed during my PhD and investigates the structure of semantic knowledge and its variation across populations and historical periods. I combine methods involving:
- cross-linguistic semantic modeling
- historical and contemporary corpora
- neuroimaging data
- cultural and ecological datasets
- computational approaches to semantic structure
This work aims to understand both universal constraints and context-dependent variations in meaning representation.
Recent Work
Semantic structure across languages
Cross-linguistic analyses of embeddings from 53 languages, semantic ratings across 8 languages, and fMRI data from 45 languages identify shared semantic dimensions and systematic ecological variation.
Ze Fu, Yuxi Chu, Tangxiaoxue Zhang, Yawen Li, Xiaosha Wang, Yanchao Bi (In Review) Semantics across the globe: A universal neurocognitive semantic structure adaptive to climate. PDF
Pathogens and semantic variation
Historical and cross-cultural analyses show that higher pathogen severity is associated with increased sensorimotor semantic dimensions in collective language use, both across countries and over the past century.
Ze Fu, Huimin Chen, Zhan Liu, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu, Yanchao Bi (2025) Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space. Communications Psychology DOI PDF
Neural encoding of semantic relations
Using graph-based semantic models and fMRI, we show that distinct neural systems encode different structural properties of linguistic relations.
Ze Fu, Xiaosha Wang, Xiaoying Wang, Huichao Yang, Jiahuan Wang, Tao Wei, Xuhong Liao, Zhiyuan Liu, Huimin Chen, Yanchao Bi (2023) Different computational relations in language are captured by distinct brain systems. Cerebral Cortex DOI PDF