Brian Scholl (Email, Personal Homepage, CV) Lab Director, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science   Brian's recent research interests include:   • Visual awareness • Mental primitives and core knowledge • How seeing relates to thinking • How the mind represents objects and events • The perception of causality, agency, physics, and time • Foundations of cognitive science • Sea-kayaking as a tool for procrastination

Dawei Bai (Email, Personal Homepage) Lab Postdoctoral Fellow   Dawei joins us from Paris, where he worked with Brent Strickland and completed his PhD at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He has explored both intuitive physics and social perception, and with us he'll be exploring their intersection -- how we perceive agent/ object interactions. For a neat demo of his past work, check out the Double Ring illusion! In his spare time, Dawei is a cinephile, who cannot imagine a week without movies. (Brian wonders if this includes the greatest movie of all time, Roadhouse?)

Vlad Chituc (Email, Personal Homepage) Lab Graduate Student   Vlad does empirical work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, studying everything from morality, to art, to supertasters. With us, he is exploring how insights from visual psychophysics can improve measurement in moral psychology and beyond -- with his latest paper titled How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime. Vlad also went to college at Yale (before working for many years in a behavioral economics lab at Duke), and took a course from Brian in 2009!

Merve Erdogan (Email) Lab Graduate Student   Merve joined our lab from Turkey, where she worked on both psychophysical and neuroscientific projects with Fuat Balci in the Timing and Decision-Making Laboratory at Koc University. She is interested in the perception of agency, causality, and time -- and especially how they all interact in unexpected ways. Her current work explores domain-specificity in vision, as psychophysically captured by studies of slow visual cognition. In her spare time, Merve gets inspired by watching her fingers moving.

Huichao Ji (Email, Personal Homepage) Lab Graduate Student   Huichao joined our lab from Sun Yat-sen University in China. She is interested in visual awareness, social perception, and the relationship(s) between seeing and thinking. (She claims to be just starting out as a PhD student, but Brian is suspicious, given that she has already published papers on all these topics and more!) Her latest lab paper is titled Visual verbs. Outside (or maybe even inside) the lab, you might see her walking around with her camera.

Niels Verosky (Email, Personal Homepage) Lab Graduate Student   Niels is interested in the perception of stimuli with complex temporal structure, and how the mind and brain integrate information over time. Before Yale, he studied computer science and music at Swarthmore, traveled the world (publishing 5 first-authored papers in the process), and worked as a research associate at NYU Abu Dhabi. Niels' most futile hobby is collecting souvenir fridge magnets that will inevitably be destroyed by his two cats.

Robert Walter (Email) Lab Graduate Student   Robert is getting a joint PhD in Philosophy and Psychology, and is exploring interactions between empirical research and issues in philosophy -- with a current focus on the phenomenon of postdiction. Before Yale, he earned degrees in Neuroscience and Philosophy at UCSD, where he studied visual working memory in Tim Brady's lab. Before that, he owned an exotic pet store and worked as an animal wrangler. Need advice for your pet tarantula? He's the one to ask.

Kim Wong (Email, Personal Homepage) Lab Graduate Student   Kim is exploring several topics in visual perception and cognition -- especially the perception of physics, the extraction of causal history in visual processing, and the nature of dynamic visual routines. Before Yale, Kim studied the perception of writing as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins (work that Brian taught in his "Intro to CogSci" class even before meeting her). She has now developed an inexplicable love for the letters A and G, but also an irrational hatred of the capital letter E.

Mario Belledonne Graduate Student, Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab   As a child, Mario watched a lot of cartoons. Some had people, others animals, and still others aliens -- and this world of cartoons often violated what we see as natural in our own world. Today, he studies the underlying computational substrates that allow humans to bridge the gap between 2D drawings and physical 3D scenes. He hails from MIT (where he worked with Josh Tenenbaum on face processing and intuitive physics), and with us (and in collaboration with Ilker Yildirim) he has developed an exciting new computational model of attention based on the notion of rational resource allocation.

Marlene Berke Graduate Student, Computational Social Cognition Lab   Marlene studies metacognition -- the ability of a system to represent and reason about itself. With us, she is conducting evolutionary simulations to reveal the degree to which our percepts faithfully reflect the external world. Before Yale, she pursued an interdisciplinary major in computational cognitive neuroscience at Cornell University. When she's not thinking about minds thinking about minds, Marlene can be found tending to her sourdough starter named Clarisse.

Aalap Shah Graduate Student, Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab   Aalap develops hypotheses for how brains process sensory information, and he uses computational models to explain/verify them. With us, he is exploring several intriguing aspects of intuitive physics. Before Yale, he received a bachelor's degree in computer science, and a masters degree in robotics -- before switching domains to study the ways of the mind and the brain. (He also worked as a software engineer, and represented his company at a special edition of Shark Tank!).

Yuting Zhang Graduate Student, Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab   Yuting is broadly interested in human attention, perception, and memory. With us, among other topics, she is exploring connections between social perception and event representation -- including how the phenomenology of chasing influences event segmentation. Before Yale, Yuting earned a BS in Psychology from Boston College. She dreams of becoming a pro Dota2 player, but for now just gets research ideas while being chased by enemies.

Pranava Dhar Undergraduate Research Assistant   At Yale, Pranava is studying Cognitive Science with a splash of philosophy, computer science, and Italian. In the lab, his research is a bit wobbly: he is exploring intersections between perception and intuitive physics, focused on the perception of physical (in)stability in stimuli such as block towers. He is distraught about the lab's move to 100 College, as this means that he will be more than a stone's throw from home in TD -- allegedly the best residential college.

Audrey Hempel Undergraduate Research Assistant   Audrey's Cognitive Science studies are guided by her interests in interpersonal relationships and social perception, through the lenses of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and computer science [1]. With us, she is exploring various dimensions of facial perception, including the perception of attention and attractiveness [2]. Beyond the lab, she races with the Yale Club Alpine Ski Team, and musics with her alternative rock band Strictly Platonic.

Joan Ongchoco (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2022) + Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-2023) Currently: Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia   While in the lab from 2017 to 2023, Joan discovered the phenomenon of scaffolded attention, and explored the nature of event segmentation. Joan started up her own lab at UBC in 2024, and her work there may continue to involve event segmentation, in the form of walking through doorways -- as in the amazing congratulatory video produced by her labmates when she earned her PhD.

Clara Colombatto (Homepage) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2021) After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, University College London, Fleming Lab Currently: Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Waterloo   While in the lab from 2016 to 2022, Clara explored social perception, with a special focus on "perceiving perception" and "attending to attention", in the form of mind contact (beyond eye contact). Her stimuli often involved people looking at each other (and away from each other), as in this congratulatory video from her labmates.

Stefan Uddenberg (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2018) After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton, Psychology Dept., Todorov Lab Currently: Assistant Professor of Psychology, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign   While in the lab from 2013 to 2018, Stefan explored the mind's 'default settings' by employing the method of serial reproduction in some exciting new ways with visual stimuli. This work led him to create the TeleFace and TelePhysics paradigms. Stefan continues to work with us on the perception of both faces and physics.

Ben van Buren (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2018) After Yale: Assistant Professor of Psychology, The New School for Social Research   While in the lab from 2013 to 2018, Ben studied social perception, including the perceived mental lives of moving geometric shapes. After his PhD, Ben headed to Leuven to do a postdoc with Johan Wagemans, after which he returned to the US to start up his own lab not too far away -- as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research in NYC.

Hannah Raila (Homepage) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2018) After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford, Psychiatry Dept., Rodriguez Lab Currently: Assistant Professor of Psychology, UC Santa Cruz   While in the lab from 2013 to 2018, Hannah explored how attentional biases may underlie and maintain both positive emotion and psychopathology, and she showed that studies using IAPS photos replicate even when semantic content is stripped from the images. Now a UCSC professor, Hannah can probably jump higher than you can.

Yi-Chia Chen (Homepage) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2017) After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard, Psychology Dept., Alvarez Lab Currently: Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA, Psychology Dept., Lu Lab   While in the lab from 2012 to 2017, Yi-Chia studied the nature of aesthetic perception, and also how visual representations of objects incorporate the inferred past events that led them to look the way they do. Her papers have mysterious titles, such as The perception of history. Yi-Chia still has ~100 collaborations going on in the lab.

Chaz Firestone (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2017) After Yale: Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins Currently: Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins   While in the lab from 2011 to 2017, Chaz studied how seeing and thinking do and do not interact -- and he also helped to jump-start the lab's now-booming work on the perception of physical stability. Chaz' papers with us always had humble, tentative titles -- such as Cognition does not affect perception.

Emily Ward (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2016); Co-advised with Marvin Chun After Yale: Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison   While in the lab from 2010 to 2016, Emily studied the nature of visual awareness, especially in the context of amazing phenomena such as inattentional blindness, iconic memory, statistical perception, and ambiguous figures. And she did all this while leading a double life, studying the neural bases of visual perception in Marvin Chun's lab. Emily then became a professor back in Brian's home state of Wisconsin.

Brandon Liverence P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2013) After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern, Psychology Dept., Franconeri Lab   While in the lab from 2008 to 2013, Brandon studied the visual representation of time and space, in contexts including subjective time dilation, event segmentation, and the 'refresh rate' of perception. When one of his papers was accepted for publication, the Editor asked him to shorten it by 78%. To relax during grad school, Brandon vacationed inside Icelandic volcanos.

Alice Albrecht P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2013); Co-advised with Marvin Chun After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley, Psychology Dept, Whitney Lab   While in the lab from 2008 to 2013, Alice explored the nature of 'statistical summary representations' in perception, including the ability to rapidly and efficiently perceive average visual attributes across space and time, and in multiple modalities. Alice has also made other discoveries that are full of holes (exploring holes vs. objects in visual attention).

Tao Gao (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2011) After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Tenenbaum Lab Currently: Associate Professor of Communication, UCLA   While in the lab from 2006 to 2011, Tao brought life to vision science, making many discoveries related to 'social vision' (in general) and to the perception of animacy (in particular). His papers have great titles (e.g. The Psychophysics of Chasing, The Wolfpack Effect) and one of them has a paragraph about assassins.

Nick Turk-Browne (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2009); Co-advised with Marvin Chun After Yale: Assistant (then Full) Professor of Psychology, Princeton University Currently: Professor of Psychology, Yale University   While in the lab from 2004 to 2009, Nick studied perception, learning, and attention, and made several discoveries related to visual statistical learning. Nick managed to escape and become a Professor at Princeton, but we eventually recaptured him and brought him back home.

Joshua New (Homepage) P&C Lab: Postdoctoral Fellow (2005-2009) After Yale: Assistant Professor of Psychology, Barnard College   While in the lab from 2005 to 2009, Josh explored 'adaptive visual cognition' -- merging evolution psychology and vision science. This led to discoveries about the nature of visual awareness, motion-induced blindness, social perception in autism spectrum disorder, and subjective time dilation. Josh, who later became a Professor at Barnard, was a postdoc, so his picture gets a border.

Jonathan Flombaum (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2008) After Yale: Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins Currently: Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins   While in the lab from 2002 to 2008, Jon made several discoveries related to object persistence and visual tracking -- often studying both human adults and nonhuman primates -- and he resuscitated studies of the 'tunnel effect'. Jon, now a professor at Johns Hopkins, still hasn't learned to appreciate folk music.

Erik Cheries (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2007); Primary advisor, Karen Wynn After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University, Lab for Developmental Studies Currently: Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UMass Amherst   While in the lab from 2002 to 2007, Erik ran studies with both babies and adults exploring how the visual system selects, maintains, and identifies objects over time -- and how this provides a foundation for object cognition. Erik, who then became a professor at UMass Amherst, has more songs on his iPod than you do.

Hoon Choi P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2006) After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston University, Watanabe Lab Currently: Associate Professor of Psychology, Hallym University   While in the lab from 2002 to 2006, Hoon made several discoveries related to causal perception, attention, and the mental representation of dynamic events. In case his picture here is too small to make out, here's a slightly bigger picture of Hoon. Hoon is now a professor back in South Korea.

Steve Mitroff (Lab Page) P&C Lab: Postdoctoral Fellow (2002-2005) After Yale: Assistant Professor of Psychology, Duke University Currently: Professor of Psychology, George Washington University   While in the lab from 2002 to 2005, Steve made discoveries about visual awareness, motion-induced blindness, and object persistence -- studying both infants and adults. We miss him, though Brian is also happy to be free of Steve's strict ban on the use of obscure latin phrases in papers.

George Alvarez	(Harvard University)
Dick Aslin	(Haskins Laboratories)
Ty Cannon	(Yale University)
Marvin Chun	(Yale University)
Phil Corlett	(Yale School of Medicine)
Molly Crockett	(Princeton University)
Jacob Feldman	(Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science)
Steve Franconeri	(Northwestern University)
Jim Hoffman	(University of Delaware)
Julian Jara-Ettinger	(Yale University)
Marcia Johnson	(Yale University)
Ami Klin	(Emory University, Marcus Autism Center)
Alan Leslie	(Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science)
Greg McCarthy	(Yale University)
Steve Most	(University of New South Wales)
Ken Nakayama	(Harvard University)
George Newman	(Rotman School of Management)
Zenon Pylyshyn	(Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science)
Laurie Santos	(Yale University)
Bob Schultz	(Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research)
Dan Simons	(University of Illinois)
Teresa Treat	(University of Iowa)
Tim Vickery	(University of Delaware)
Karen Wynn	(Yale University)
Do-Joon Yi	(Yonsei University)
Ilker Yildirim	(Yale University)
Steve Zucker	(Yale University)

Action, Computation, & Thinking Lab	(Sam McDougle)
Affect Regulation & Cognition Lab	(Jutta Joorman)
Automaticity Lab	(John Bargh)
Baby Lab	(Dick Aslin)
Belief, Learning, & Memory Lab	(Phil Corlett)
Brain & Cognition Lab	(Kia Nobre)
Cognition & Development Lab	(Frank Keil)
Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab	(Ilker Yildirim)
Comparative Cognition Lab	(Laurie Santos)
Computational Cognitive Architecture Lab	(Tyler Brooke-Wilson)
Computational Social Cognition Lab	(Julian Jara-Ettinger)
Computational Vision Group	(Steve Zucker)
Consumer Decision Making Lab	(Ravi Dhar, Nathan Novemsky)
Experimental Philosophy Group	(Joshua Knobe)
Human Neuroscience Lab	(Greg McCarthy)
Infant Mind & Cognition Lab	(Nicolo Cesana-Arlotti)
Philosophical Psychology	(Tamar Gendler)
Rutledge Lab	(Robb Rutledge)
Social Cognitive Development Lab	(Yarrow Dunham)
Social Neuroscience Lab	(Steve Chang)
Social Robotics Lab	(Brian Scassellati)
Thinking Lab	(Woo-Kyoung Ahn)
Turk-Browne Lab	(Nick Turk-Browne)
Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab	(Marvin Chun)