Rong Ding

I am a PhD student at Language and Computation in Neural Systems Group led by Dr. Andrea E. Martin. My main research interest lies in grounding linguistic processing as operations on data representation in the human brain network. Currently, I am working closely with Dr. Sanne ten Oever and Dr. Martin to investigate the neural mechanism underpinning pronoun resolution, which I see as an initial step to bridge mechanistic accounts of neurobiological processes (e.g., neural oscillation), cognition, and linguistic conceptualisation (e.g., ellipsis). In the meantime, I am honing my knowledge and skills in complexity and network neuroscience, with the hope to address broader questions such as how the brain network reconfigures itself (self-organises) in real-time to achieve stability but also flexibility in cognitive functions like language.

Prior to starting here at the MPI, I was trained as a psychologist but also a language scientist from the interdisciplinary BSc Psychology and BA Indonesian language and culture programmes at Peking University. My interest in research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and language was sparked there. After that, I further pursued an MSc in Language Sciences (with specialisation in neuroscience and communication) at University College London. My thesis project which was developed under the supervision of Dr. Ye (Claudia) Zhang and Prof. Gabriella Vigliocco centred on the neurophysiology of predictive coding during naturalistic multimodal speech comprehension in native and non-native speakers of English.