Welcome! I'm Mengxin (AvA) Ran | 冉孟馨. I'm a master's student in Psychology at The University of Chicago, in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), where I work with Prof. Monica Rosenberg and collaborate with Prof. Yuan Chang Leong. My thesis studies the neural mechanisms of insight in STEM learning — how moments of understanding while watching science videos shape what people go on to remember. Before Chicago, I earned my B.S. in Psychology (minor in Game Studies) from The Ohio State University, where I was trained by Prof. Julie Golomb (2022–2024), and then worked with Prof. Oriel FeldmanHall at Brown University (2024–2025) and Prof. Feilong Ma at the University of South Carolina (2025–2026).
My research asks how people segment, interpret, and remember continuous, naturalistic experience, and why the same input yields different stories across individuals. I study this with computational neuroimaging, pairing fMRI, fNIRS, EEG, and eye-tracking with methods built for individual differences. Three questions drive the work:
- From experience to memory: How does the brain segment continuous experience into discrete events, and how do moments of insight and prediction error during learning shape what gets encoded and later recalled?
- Shared versus idiosyncratic responses: When people take in the same event, where do their neural responses align and where do they diverge? I use functional alignment and inter-subject correlation to separate shared structure from individual signal.
- Decoding individual narratives: If different brains construct different accounts of the same input, can we recover the cognitive mechanisms behind them from idiosyncratic neural representations?
To do this I build analysis pipelines that sit between geometry, statistics, and cognitive theory. My methods include hyperalignment, inter-subject correlation, RSA and searchlight analysis, MVPA, mixed-effects models, and machine learning, applied to fMRI, fNIRS, 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