Dr. Xiaochen Y Zheng

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I - left one on the picture - am a cognitive neuroscientist who’s always excited about the cognitive control processes in the brain, especially how they are shared between language and other cognitive systems.

Recently, I joined the the Department of Cognitive Psychology in Leiden University, thanks to a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council. With this grant, I will work with Sander Nieuwenhuis and explore the working memory gating process in context-dependent language control - stay tuned for updates!

Up till Summer 2024, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. I worked with Roshan Cools in the the Motivation & Cognitive Control lab, investigating the neural and cognitive mechanism of compositional generalization in language and action planning. In the meantime, I also functioned as a coordinating postdoc at the Dutch research consortium “Language in Interaction”, co-steering an international multi-disciplinary scientific team.

Previously, I was a PhD student at the Donders Center for Cognition (promotor: Ardi Roelofs), also an alumni of International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences. My doctoral thesis investigates the cognitive control and monitoring processes in bilingual speech production.

Beside science, I am also curious about food, cats, and my future adventures around the world.

Favorite topics

  • domain-general vs. domain-specific cognitive control
  • control and monitoring in speech production
  • bilingual switching and task switching
  • cognitive mapping and model-based planning

Research methods

  • electrophysiological measures (EEG, MEG)
  • functional MRI
  • (a little bit of) computational modelling
  • and of course LOADs of behavioral measures

Other collaborators