Mi Xue Tan

PhD student

I am a 5th year PhD student at the Laboratory for Behavioral Neurology and Imaging of Cognition (LabNIC), University of Geneva. I’m affiliated with the Medical Image Processing Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). I study the changes in behaviour, the body, and the brain when we experience different emotions. To this aim, I have developed and implemented a stealth game in Unity in collaboration with the Human Neuroscience Platform. Using video games in emotion research increases engagement through active participation in the experiment, is highly immersive, and yet remains highly controllable for systematic appraisal manipulations. My work involves studying the relationship between behaviour, physiology, and brain activations with fMRI to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of emotions. I completed an MSc in Neural Systems and Computation, a joint programme of the University of Zurich and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH Zurich) at the Institute of Neuroinformatics.