Ruihan joined the lab in 2017 as a masters student and completed her PhD in 2024. Ruihan’s research interests are in the construction and modulation of mentalizing and the importance of context. Ruihan’s work on smile discrimination is popular with lots of students, so Ruihan’s still regularly involved in the lab.

During her PhD, Ruihan explored the cognitive mechanism and neural correlates of implicit mentalizing and the inter-relationship between implicit and explicit mentalizing in both autistic and non-autistic people. Ruihan also investigated potential factors that could be modulate mentalizing, such as evaluative contexts and intergroup bias. She used behavioural measures, eye-tracking and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNiRS) to investigate these topics.