Nina is an Assistant Professor in the Brain and Cognitive Science area (Department of Psychology & Neuroscience Graduate Program) at the University of Southern California.
She earned a joint PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University with a focus on the computational processes that govern learning, memory and decision-making. During her postdoctoral studies at Caltech, she tested how this framework scales up to predict behavior in social, interactive and real-world settings.
She completed a joint BA in History and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, and, relatedly, is an avid proponent of interdisciplinary work to help unravel and demystify (if possible) the profound complexities of the human experience.
Avisha's research focuses on how people make decisions in social contexts, how they infer others’ goals and intentions, and how these inferences structure memory for events.
She uses naturalistic stimuli, interactive tasks, and behavioral methods to study the cognitive processes underlying social perception and memory.
Join the lab!
InCog lab is recruiting PhD students
(starting Fall 2026).
If interested, e-mail Nina Rouhani (nrouhani@usc.edu) with your CV and a description of your research goals.