About Me

Mengxin's motivation

My path into Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience began with a simple, persistent fascination: people are endlessly interesting. We are creatures who doubt, evade, say things we don't mean, deceive ourselves — and yet we long for love and connection. We resonate with stories told thousands of years ago, seeing ourselves in strangers separated by centuries and oceans. But in the same era, in the same room, we misunderstand each other. We let small differences in perspective become walls, and walls become wars.

This tension has stayed with me for as long as I can remember. Not as an academic question at first — just as a feeling. A fascination with the gap between how deeply people can understand each other and how often they don't. Eventually, I realized this tension has a name in cognitive science: narrative. Stories are simultaneously the most powerful tool for human empathy and the deepest source of cognitive bias. The same mechanism that lets you cry over a character in a novel can also make you dismiss someone sitting across from you.

The research thread

This fascination is what brought me to Prof. Oriel FeldmanHall's lab at Brown University. There, I studied how people make social decisions — how emotion and context shape whether someone chooses to cooperate or compete. What I found most compelling was not the average behavior, but the variance: given the same situation, different people construct entirely different internal stories about what is happening, what matters, and what they should do.

But behavioral data only shows you the output — the decision, the reaction time, the choice. It can't show you what's happening inside. That's what led me to computational neuroimaging.

At the Golomb Lab at Ohio State, I learned how to use representational similarity analysis and neuroimaging methods to study how the brain organizes information. My published work there examined how the spatial location of a moving object influences how we judge its identity — a question about how perception is shaped by context, which turned out to be more connected to my deeper interests than I initially realized.

Now, in Prof. Feilong Ma's lab at the University of South Carolina, I work on hyperalignment — a computational method that aligns brain data across different individuals into a shared representational space. I didn't come to this method because it is technically elegant (though it is). I came to it because it is a key: it lets you see how different brains encode the same experience differently. It lets you quantify the very thing that has always fascinated me — why two people can watch the same film, hear the same story, live through the same event, and come away with entirely different understandings.

What I'm really asking

If I distill everything — every lab, every project, every late-night question — into a single sentence, it is this:

Why do people construct different narratives from the same shared experience — and how are those differences written into the brain?

This question is large enough to sustain a career. It connects social cognition, narrative processing, individual differences, and computational neuroimaging. And it comes from somewhere real — not from a textbook, but from a lifelong observation that humans are the most fascinating, contradictory, heartbreaking, beautiful things in the world.

Working style

I am someone who thinks by doing. I learn methods fastest when I have a question that demands them. I am drawn to interdisciplinary work — I find the most interesting problems live at the boundaries between fields. I value clarity in writing, honesty in collaboration, and the kind of intellectual environment where people are genuinely curious rather than performatively productive.

I am currently seeking PhD opportunities beginning Fall 2027 in Cognitive Neuroscience, with a focus on narrative cognition, social neuroscience, or computational approaches to individual differences in brain function.

Reach me at: ranpsy2001@gmail.com