Xian Li | Cognitive Neuroscience

Xian Li 

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences,

Johns Hopkins University,

Baltimore MD, 21218

xli239@jhu.edu or xianl.cogneuro@gmail.com 

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Research Trajectory

Hey, this is Xian! I’m a 5th-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. I am co-advised by Dr. Janice Chen and Dr. Christopher Honey. My research leverages naturalistic paradigms to investigate how we process ongoing events and how these experiences are encoded and retrieved from memory using behavioral measures, computational models, and fMRI.

My journey in cognitive neuroscience began in 2016, when I studied how people with Multiple Sclerosis could have reserved cognitive capacities when the functional network is preserved to work around the lesion sites. Since then, I've studied sensory processing and human memory with Dr. Howard Nusbaum and Dr. David Gallo at the University of Chicago, using EEG/ERP and task-fMRI. After completing my Master's program, I worked with Dr. Joseph DeGutis and Dr. Mike Esterman to study the behavioral and neural deficits associated with developmental prosopagnosia (face blindness) at Harvard Medical School.

These research experiences across diverse cognitive functions and neuroimaging methods have fostered my interest in exploring how low-level sensory processes interact with high-level cognitive processes to shape various cognitive functions in our daily lives. Hence, my Ph.D. primarily focuses on how we remember a complex series of events and how having agency might affect them. 

Primary Projects

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Project: How does agency affect memory?

Humans are agents: our choices actively shape the trajectory of events in our lives. These choices rely on personal knowledge and preferences that can affect later memory. In this behavioral project, we studied how people’s memory of a naturalistic sequence of events is altered when their choices control the future using choose-your-own-adventure stories. We also examined how memory performance is affected in the face of denial of choices. 

We are collecting fMRI data of subjects doing the choose-your-own-adventure stories. This follow-up study aims to understand the neural associations for agency's effects on memory.

Interruption Project: How do we maintain and restore the mental context for narratives?

Memory enables us to use past experiences to guide present action. But how can we restore or maintain the previous narrative context in the face of interruptions in our environments? In this fMRI project, we aimed to study how narrative contexts are built, where it is processed and sustained in the brain, what the hippocampus's role is in this process, and how they relate to subjects' memory performance and self-reported lingering thoughts about the narrative.

We also plan to simulate and test these proposed memory processes using computational models.

Static Scene Project: How do we process complex images during self-guided viewing?

Studies of scene perception often focus on brief visual presentation (<1 second). But it may take several seconds, or even minutes, to make sense of a complex scene in real life. As each person takes their own “exploration path” through a visual scene, how does the history of their path influence their understanding of the next moment? In this fMRI study, we tested whether exploration paths during the perception of complex images could predict neural responses within and across individuals. 

Other Projects

AI rate causal relations: ChatGPT agent does causal rating for narrative events on par with humans

ChatGPT agent that does causal rating for narrative events

Try out the Causal Rater for Story on an event-segmented story. This also works with movie descriptions. See an example input below.

Thinking out-loud (fMRI): Neural dynamics of spontaneous memory recall and future thinking in the continuous flow of thoughts

The human brain constantly recalls past events and anticipates future ones, generating a continuous flow of thoughts. But what neural mechanisms underlie this process? In this fMRI project, we examined the neural dynamics associated with the natural transitions and flow structure of spontaneous memory and future thinking. Find out more below.

Contact Me

@ 2025, Xian Li

xianl.cogneuro@gmail.com