I'm a psychologist and neuroscientist!
I completed my Ph.D. at the IDG / McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Beijing Normal University. Then I became a faculty in the Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. I worked as a visiting associate in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, from 2017 to 2019. Now I work in CCBS at the University of Macau.
I am interested in exploring the mechanisms that describe and/or affect behavioral and neural responses during emotion and decision making (both for human and human-AI interaction) in social interaction. My interest also lies in the area of the interactions between social relations cognition and languages. In my research, I use diverse methods (Mturk, psychophysiological recordings, mouse tracking, and fMRI) to find answers to below questions:
- How can we compute and measure aspects of social inference, decision making, and strategic interactions?
- What is the role of oxytocin in the social adaptation brain?
- How do reward and punishment systems interact during social decisions and interaction with AIs?
- How representation of social relations be affected by (different) language structure?
Haoming is a third-year PhD student in the lab. Before joining the A.N.D lab, Haoming received his bachelor’s degree at Southern University of Science and Technology. He is mainly interested in two specific topics. The first one is to investigate how the brain encoding the information about the direction of motion (forward & backward) by using intracranial electroencephalographic to recording and analyze the electrophysiological signal. The second is to investigate the neural machinery of the human brain for making safe, risky decisions. Haoming uses different kinds of methods in the research, which include EEG, sEEG, machine learning, and neural network.
Kun CHEN is a third-year Ph.D. student in the lab. He graduated with a B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Kun's research passions lie in two interconnected areas: 1) Investigating how different forms of knowledge are encoded and retrieved in the human brain, and understanding how these representations influence our behavior. 2) Building on this foundation, he extends his inquiry to the representation of emotions. Utilizing computational modeling and neural recording techniques, Kun explores how emotions are represented and processed in the brain, and how they shape social decisions.
Xinyi is a second-year Ph.D. student in the lab. Before joining the lab, she received her bachelor’s degree in EE at Wuhan University of Technology. Her research seeks to investigate 1) how moral decisions shape memory, 2) the role of cognitive control brain in regulating this interaction, 3) neurocompuational mechanism of metacognition. She uses diverse methods (fMRI, sEEG, mouse tracking, computational modeling and neural networks) with aims to reveal the cognitive and neural processes behind social cognition.
Keyu is a second-year Ph.D. student who received B.Sc. (Psychology) degrees from both Southwest University in Chongqing, China, and the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Generally, she is interested in investigating the neural basis of social cognition and affection using multi-modality methods in topics including 1) the intrinsically biased or limited information sampling process, together with 2) their impact on adaptive learning and decision-making and 3) the role of individuals' affective experience during those processes.
I am a first-year PhD student in the lab. I received my B.E. degree in Economics from China University of Geosciences (Beijing) and my M.E. degree in Psychology from Southwest University. Recently, I have been exploring the secrets behind social cognition and interaction, especially focusing on mentalization. I am very interested in understanding the dynamic neural mechanisms of direct and indirect mentalization.
Xinrui Zhang is a first-year joint PhD student in the lab, jointly trained by Prof. Xin’ an Liu from the Brain Cognition and Brain Disease Institute, CAS and Prof. Haiyan Wu from the University of Macau. She holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of International Business and Economics, and an M.A. degree in Finance from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are focused on decision making and depressive disorder, aiming to investigate the intervention in early childhood to proactively mitigate mental health challenges.
He Miao is a graduate student majoring in Cognitive Neuroscience. He got his bachelor degree from the Faculty of Business Admisitration in the University of Macau. He is interested in the neural mechanisms of risky decision making and social information seeking. He is now investigating the utility function of social and non-social information in specific social conditions, and also focusing on the brain stimulation techniques to manipulate the reward-based decision making behaviour.
Cuilin He is a first-year graduate student in the lab, majoring in Cognitive Neuroscience. She graduated with a B.S. in Applied Psychology from South China Normal University. Her current research interests lie in how humans perceive and cope with uncertainty in the environment. She is also interested in Human-AI interaction.
Xinze Wang is a first-year graduate student in the lab, majoring in Cognitive Neuroscience. He graduated with a B.S. degree in Applied Psychology from Chengdu University. Currently, he is interested in human behavior and decision-making in social interactions, and he is striving to learn a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques in order to better understand the brain.
Eric is an undergraduate student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong majoring in Psychology. He joined as an external part-time RA in 2023. Eric is interested in using decision-making as a window to study the human mind, specifically, he is interested in how the brain processes emotion and social relationships. Currently, he is applying an advance modelling technique called the Hidden Markov Model on neuroimaging data to study dishonesty.