Welcome! I'm Mengxin (AvA) Ran | 冉孟馨. I study narrative cognition and visio-semantic processing: how stories are encoded, remembered, and shared across minds. I earned my B.S. in Psychology (minor in Game Studies) from The Ohio State University, where I was fortunately trained by Prof. Julie Golomb (2022–2024), and subsequently by Prof. Oriel FeldmanHall at Brown University (2024–2025) and Prof. Feilong Ma at the University of South Carolina. This fall, I will be joining the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) at the University of Chicago, where I will work with Prof. Monica Rosenberg and Prof. Yuan Chang Leong.
The same event leaves different traces in different minds, and the narratives people construct from those traces are never mere descriptions but also acts of meaning-making: ways of reconciling experience with desire. I work at the intersection of narrative cognition, individual differences, and computational neuroimaging. Three questions drive my research:
- From experience to narrative: How does the brain segment continuous sensory input into discrete events and organize them into causally and temporally structured narrative representations?
- Neural alignment and the limits of shared understanding: When two people experience the same event, where do their neural responses converge and where do they diverge, and why is consensus in creative production so difficult to achieve?
- Decoding idiosyncratic neural mechanisms: If different brains construct different narratives, can we reverse-engineer the cognitive mechanisms that produce them from idiosyncratic neural representations?
To address these questions, I build computational pipelines at the intersection of geometry, statistics, and cognitive theory. My methods include hyperalignment, MVPA, searchlight analysis, mixed-effects models, and machine learning, applied to fMRI, EEG, and eye-tracking data. I code in Python, R, and MATLAB.
Publications
About Me
Two things I keep coming back to: experiencing the world, and trying to build bits of it.
These are some projects I've worked on along the way.
Contact
I welcome questions, comments, and collaboration. I normally reply within 24 hours: mran@uchicago.edu