Siyi Zeng

Siyi Zeng obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biological Science at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022. She went on to complete a Master of Science in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Amsterdam in 2025 (cum laude). Her training spans biology, neuroscience, and social and consumer psychology, with a methodological focus on eye-tracking, pupillometry, fMRI data processing, behavioral and computational modeling. Before her PhD projects, she worked on several research projects, including a collaboration with Magnus Söderlund (Stockholm School of Economics) on the uncanny valley effect with the perceived humanness of service agents.

Siyi is a PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Hasselt University, supervised by Kim Willems and Lieve Doucé. Her doctoral research investigates how consumers process information in digital environments, and how the often-forgotten senses can be addressed in online consumer decision making. She focuses on sensory marketing and on immersive, sensory-enabling technologies as ways to bring these senses into online shopping.

One of the main projects Siyi works on is the FWO project "The role of automatic and deliberate mental imagery in multi-sensory digital consumer environments."