Xian Li

How does memory construct meaning and feeling?

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Psychology, UCLA

• Agency. How does choosing what happens next change what we remember?
• Continuity. How does the brain keep a thread of thought across interruptions?
• Feeling. How do feelings emerge from memory?

Publications Talks Software & data CV Demo

I am a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how memory, meaning, and feeling emerge from experience as it is lived. I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), working with Dr. Maureen Ritchey and Dr. Ajay Satpute. My postdoctoral work aims to address how feelings are constructed from memories.

I completed my Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 2026, co-advised by Dr. Janice Chen and Dr. Christopher Honey . My dissertation, Organization of Real-World Human Memory, built two paradigms for studying naturalistic cognition: choose-your-own-adventure paradigm, which showed that having agency over experiences personalizes memory (Nature Communications, 2026), and interrupted narratives, which revealed a cortical pathway alongside the hippocampal pathway by which the brain keeps a story in mind across interruptions (preprint, under review).

I came to the field of computational cognitive neuroscience through a sequence of labs that together span the methods I use today: brain-network analyses of cognitive reserve in multiple sclerosis patients at the University at Buffalo; auditory perceptual learning, emotional speech, and memory distortion with Dr. Howard Nusbaum and Dr. David Gallo at the University of Chicago (M.A., 2019); and the behavioral and neural signatures of developmental prosopagnosia (face blindness) as a full-time Research Associate with Dr. Joseph DeGutis and Dr. Michael Esterman at Harvard Medical School. That path left me with the question that organizes my work now: how perception, comprehension, memory, and feeling emerge in the flow of more complex everyday lives.

Research interests

I study the emergent properties of naturalistic cognition: how memory, meaning, and feeling arise from temporally extended experience. Three features of real-life experience organize my current work: how does agency change daily cognition, how do we preserve an interrupted thread of thought, how do feelings emerge from memory-based situation comprehension. Each line of my work opens the next: choosing what happens next personalizes memory organization; an organized memory must be preserved across interruptions in a world full of distractions; the memory preserved should shape how new events feel. The last is the question of my postdoctoral work.

Findings so far, and the instrument behind them

• Choice makes memory ours. In choose-your-own-adventure stories read by 324 participants, having agency did not simply strengthen memory; it personalized it, moving each reader's recall away from the generic semantic space that a model of everyone's text would predict and toward the individual. Nature Communications, 2026.
• The story persists in an inverted code. In 73 adults listening to interrupted stories, two pathways kept the narrative alive: hippocampal activity at each interruption that predicted later recall, and a posterior medial cortex pattern that persisted through pauses and a competing task in an inverted code, predicting how fully brain activity recovered after each interruption and how much was remembered, beyond the hippocampal effect. Preprint, 2026, under review; data and code.
• Spontaneous thought moves through the same networks. Transitions in the free flow of thought, spoken aloud in the scanner, engage the same brain networks that external event boundaries do. Nature Communications, 2025 (second author); annotated dataset in Scientific Data, 2026.
• People and language models as subjects of the same science. I built narRaters (GitHub), an open human-in-the-loop pipeline that scores narrative recall and rates narrative structure with local or cloud models, and I measure how closely models agree with people on the causal structure of stories and on what is remembered (Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 2026; manuscript in preparation).

News All #publication #preprint #talk #conference #award #software #milestone

• [2026/10] Started as a Postdoctoral Researcher at UCLA with Dr. Maureen Ritchey and Dr. Ajay Satpute. #milestone
• [2026/10] Data blitz talk at the human memory area meeting, Department of Psychology, UCLA. #talk
• [2026/09] New preprint: Cortical and hippocampal pathways to mental continuity (Li, Lee & Honey), with data and code on Zenodo. #preprint
• [2026/09] Our dataset paper An fMRI dataset of verbalized spontaneous thought with annotated transcripts and self-report trait measures (Zhang et al.) is out in Scientific Data. #publication
• [2026/09] Talk at the Tompary Lab (Dr. Alexa Tompary), Drexel University. #talk
• [2026/08] Ph.D. conferred by Johns Hopkins University. #milestone
• [2026/08] Talk at the Naturalistic Cognition Lab (Dr. Coraline Iordan), University of Rochester. #talk
• [2026] Our paper Interactive narratives reveal the personalizing effect of agency on episodic memory is out in Nature Communications. #publication
• [2026] Received the Walter L. Clark Scholar Award from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. #award
• [2026] Three presentations at the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN), New York: human and LLM alignment in causal reasoning (first author), and two mentored projects. #conference
• [2026] Abstract at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Annual Meeting: Cortical and hippocampal pathways to mental continuity (Li, Lee & Honey). #conference
• [2026] Poster at the Context and Episodic Memory Symposium (CEMS), Philadelphia: Two pathways to mental continuity (Li & Honey). #conference
• [2026/04] Colloquium talk at the Cognitive Neuroscience program, Ohio State University. #talk
• [2026/03] Talks at the Voss Lab and Jacobs Lab (Dr. Joel Voss, Dr. Josh Jacobs), University of Chicago, and at the MemoLab (Dr. Maureen Ritchey), UCLA. #talk
• [2026/02] Talk at the Stanford Memory Lab (Dr. Anthony Wagner), Stanford University. #talk
• [2026] narRaters, a human-in-the-loop pipeline and web interface for narrative recall analysis, released on GitHub and PyPI (Zenodo archive). #software
• [2025/09] Talk at the Dynamic Perception and Memory Lab (Dr. Chris Baldassano), Columbia University. #talk
• [2025] Our paper Neural dynamics of spontaneous memory recall and future thinking in the continuous flow of thoughts (Su, Li, et al.) is out in Nature Communications. #publication
• [2025] Our paper Left hemisphere abnormalities in face-selective activation and functional connectivity in developmental prosopagnosia (Campbell, Li, et al.) is out in Imaging Neuroscience. #publication
• [2025] Presentations at SfN, Chicago (Agency personalizes episodic memories; Narrative representations resist interference) and at CCN, Boston (Neural representations that resist interference). #conference
• [2025/03] Talk at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute seminar (Dr. Kenneth Norman), Princeton University. #talk
• [2025/02] Talk at the Decision Neuroscience Lab (Dr. Tobias Donner), University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. #talk
• [2025] Awarded the Dissertation Prize Fellowship, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University (2025–2026). #award
• [2024] Talk at CEMS and poster at SfN: Agency enhances individuality in memory for narratives. #conference
• [2024] Effects of congruent emotional contexts during encoding on recognition: An ERPs study (Xie, Han, Liu, Li & Guo) is out in Psychophysiology. #publication
• [2022/07] Talk at the Episodic Memory Group (Dr. Chris Bird), University of Sussex. #talk
• [2022] The role of agency in memory for narratives: CCN, San Francisco; talk and poster at CEMS. #conference
• [2021] Talk and poster at SfN on how a viewer's exploration path during self-guided viewing of complex photographs predicts the brain's response patterns. #conference
• [2021] Science of Learning Fellowship, Science of Learning Institute, Johns Hopkins University (2021–2022). #award
• [2020] Elsevier / Vision Research Travel Award, Vision Sciences Society. #award
• [2020] Invited talk, Vision Sciences Society. #talk

Feel free to reach out about the choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) paradigm and ways to bring agency into memory studies, LLM-based rating tools for naturalistic experiments, or the neural mechanisms of naturalistic event comprehension and memory. Email: xianl.cogneuro@gmail.com