Mehrgol Tiv PhD

I am starting as an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Pitt in the Fall of 2025. I completed my PhD in Experimental Psychology at McGill University, and I received my B.Phil in Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the Pitt faculty, I was a researcher at the US Census Bureau.

My research is driven by an interdisciplinary, social-ecological approach to human cognition. I am interested in how diverse social experiences, such as interpersonal bridging of distinct perspectives or ambient exposure to neighborhood-level social diversity, relate to the way we adaptively understand information. I study this within the domains of language, social cognition, social category perception, identity, and much more. 

I leverage a broad range of tools to quantify subtle dynamics in social experience, including Social Network Analysis and population demographic analysis from federal datasets. I link these experiential factors to experimental and neurocognitive outcomes, including performance on computerized behavioral tasks (e.g., self-paced reading, resource allocation, social games, cognitive batteries) as well as eye movement patterns using eyetracking.

Select Publications

Tiv, M., Kutlu, E., Gullifer, J.G., Feng, R.Y., Doucerain, M.M., & Titone, D. (2022). Bridging Interpersonal and Ecological Dynamics of Cognition through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Tiv, M., O’Regan, E., & Titone, D. (2021). In a bilingual state of mind: Investigating the continuous relationship between bilingual language experience and mentalizing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 

Tiv, M. & Spence, C. (2024). Does ethnoracial context diversity predict implicit associations of sexual orientation? Evidence from linked Census Bureau and Implicit Association Test data. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.

Tiv, M., Ennis, S., Fernandez, L., Bhaskar, R., & Porter, S. (in press) Examining Heterogeneity in Racial Identification among Middle Eastern and North African Peoples in the American Community Survey. Self and Identity.