Dr. Xinchi Yu is presenting his work as a candidate for a tenure track faculty member in the Neuroscience and Behavior Department. For humans, vision and language are two critical sources of information about the world: we see or hear about new food trucks on campus, appreciate the beauty of paintings or poems, and code a variety of scenes or texts into memory – some are better remembered and some are easier to forget. While existing work has suggested shared and unique brain regions for visual and linguistic processing, challenges remain in moving beyond this cartographic (“where”) approach and towards more mechanistic (“how”) understanding of the brain. In this seminar, I will discuss how my past and future works contribute to this “how” question, on three specific topics: object representation, aesthetic appreciation, and memory.