Zefan Zheng

Main Research Area
The best part of being alive is that we feel like we can enjoy incredibly rich conscious experiences at every single moment, no matter when we are awake or dreaming. However, previous research has found that we can only attend to and memorize only a small fraction of external sensory input. Given this, many scholars argue the richness of our conscious experiences might just be an illusion and we only experience what we attend to and memorize afterwards. Is that really the case? I aim to give a better answers to the relationship between attention, consciousness, and memory in my PhD project using behavioural, eye-tracking, MEG, and fMRI evidence.
Vita
Ausbildung
| 2019–2020 | Master of Science in Psychology of Language (with Distinction), The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK |
| 2014–2018 | Bachelor of Arts in German Language and Literature, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China |
Werdegang
| Seit 2021 | PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience with Prof. Dr. Lucia Melloni, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany |
Publications
Publications
Zheng, Z., Trübutschek, D., Huang, S., Cai, Y., & Melloni, L. (2025). What you saw a while ago determines what you see now: Extending awareness priming to implicit behaviors and uncovering its temporal dynamics. Cognition, 259, 106104.
Zheng, Z. F., Huang, S. Y., Lu, S., & Cai, Y. C. (2023). Interaction between top-down decision-driven congruency effect and bottom-up input-driven congruency effect is correlated with conscious awareness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Projects
Grants & Awards
Grants & Awards
| n/a | PhD scholarship of Berlin School of Mind and Brain (declined after acceptance) |