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Welcome to Yale's Perception & Cognition Lab!
We're a group of cognitive scientists who are interested in all aspects of perception, cognition, and how they relate to each other. For more information on the research going on in our lab (including papers, manuscripts, demos, etc.), check out some of the individual homepages of our members listed below. We work in close collaboration with several other labs here at Yale, especially Marvin Chun's Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.
Quick Links
Recent Lab Abstracts
Reference Guides
Lab Photo Album
Recent Lab News
- Welcome to new graduate student Aysu Suben! Aysu hails from Franklin and Marhsall College and just arrived this fall to begin her studies and projects in the lab.
(September 2009)
- Congratulations to Nick Turk-Browne! At this past weekend's commencement ceremonies, Nick not only received his Ph.D., but he received the James B. Grossman Dissertation Prize, given annually to the best doctoral dissertation in Psychology at Yale. (May 2009)
- Congratulations to Nick Turk-Browne, who recently defended his PhD dissertation on The Nature of Visual Statistical Learning, and who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. Nick will be setting up his own lab this summer, and will start his new position in the fall! (April 2009)
- Congratulations to Josh New, who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Barnard College in New York City. Josh will be setting up his own lab this summer, and will start his new position in the fall! (April 2009)
- Congratulations to undergraduate research assistant Jinjin Sun, who has received a Dean's Summer Fellowship in the Social Sciences and Humanities from Yale College to support research in our laboratory over the summer. Jinjin will be continuing her research on how, why, and when we perceive animacy and goal-directedness in simple animations. (April 2009)
- Congratulations to former undergraduate research assistant Phillip Isola. He managed a year of computer programming, but in the end he just couldn't stay away from cognitive science -- and so he will be starting this fall as a graduate student in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT. We wish him the best as he pursues his interests in computational modeling of cognition and perception. (April 2009)
- Congratulations to Tao Gao, who has received a 2009 VSS Vision Research Travel Award for the talk he will give this summer at the Vision Sciences Society on the perception of animacy. This is an especially impressive accomplishment this year, since there were over 300 applicants for these awards! (February 2009)
- Congratulations to Jon Flombaum, who recently defended his PhD dissertation on Persisting Objects: Building Blocks of Attention, Memory and Action, and who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Jon will be making this transition to set up his own lab in January, 2009. Jon's work on the horizon is so interesting that Brian is seriously considering applying later this year to work in Jon's lab as a graduate student. (June 2008)
Lab News Archive
Faculty
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Brian Scholl (Email, Personal Homepage)
Lab Director, Associate Professor of Psychology
Brian's recent research interests include:
• Visual awareness
• Representing objects in the mind
• The perception of animacy, causality, and time
• 'Core knowledge' in cognition and perception
• Foundations of cognitive science
• Sea-kayaking as a tool for procrastination
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Graduate Students
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Alice Albrecht (Email)
Graduate Student; Also in Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Alice, who joined us after working as an RA with Lynn Robertson's group at Berkeley, is interested in how humans perceive objects and in the neural substrates of this ability. She's currently exploring the nature of 'statistical summary representations' in perception, including the ability to rapidly and efficiently average visual attributes across space and time. Alice also has other discoveries that are full of holes (exploring holes vs. objects in visual attention).
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Tao Gao (Email)
Graduate Student
Tao is studying many different topics in visual cognition, with a special focus on the perception of animacy and intentionality. His latest paper has a great title (The Psychophysics of Chasing) and a paragraph about assassins. His previous research in China explored visual search, object-based attention and working memory, motion perception, and trans-saccadic integration. Tao has excellent taste, which is to say that he reads a lot of science fiction.
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Brandon Liverence (Email)
Graduate Student
Brandon is interested in how information is represented and organized in the mind -- e.g. in time perception, binding of objects into scenes in memory, embodied perception and tool use, and visual tracking. Somehow he managed to be actively studying all of this only a few weeks after he arrived. Brandon's past is mysterious; rumors suggest that he was once a Stanford student, an archaeologist, a marine biologist, and a pharmaceutical consultant.
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Aysu Suben (Email)
Graduate Student
Aysu's multifarious interests include the cognitive and perceptual processes that help extract meanings from ambiguous images, cross-cultural differences in the metaphorical structuring of thought, and the functional architecture of the mind. Before joining the lab this year, she spent some time in Japan, practiced meditation at a Zen Buddhist temple, learned various languages, and wrote a book on drug abuse that was used as a textbook.
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Affiliates
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Alexandria Marino
MD/PhD Student, Yale School of Medicine
Alexandria developed an interest in vision science as an undergrad in the lab several years ago, and published her undergraduate thesis in P&P. Now she's back -- this time as an MD/PhD student in the School of Medicine. With us, she's studying how attention is distributed within various kinds of objects. Alexandria also plays a mean fiddle, and is adjusting to the fact that she will be spending the next million years or so in school.
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George Newman (Personal Homepage)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Consumer Decision Making Lab, School of Management
George recently received his PhD from our department, where he worked with just about every faculty member in cognitive and developmental psychology. With us, he made great strides in understanding the perception of causality and animacy, in both infants and adults. Now at SoM, he collaborates with us on the perception of design, and the ways in which we extract information from displays. For work in our lab, George underwent thorough on-the-job training.
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Brent Strickland
Graduate Student, Cognition and Development Lab
Brent wants to know what thoughts are made of. He thinks that the most basic units of cognition are revealed in a fascinating variety of ways: through the behavior of young infants, the semantics of natural language, and performance of the visual system. He is currently studying event perception and cognition, suspecting that event types might constitute one such basic unit. With Brent here, Brian is now focusing less on science, and is instead just practicing table-tennis.
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Undergraduates
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Riana Betzler
Research Assistant
Riana is interested in many facets of statistical learning, especially as related to language acquisition and visual perception. She somehow became an expert in this area and conducted her own SL research projects before even arriving at Yale as a first-year undergraduate student. We're still not sure how this is possible. Riana's current research with us explores how statistical learning functions in situations that closely resemble natural language.
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Samantha Ellner
Research Assistant
Sam is too busy with her research to write anything here about her interests. Even before coming to Yale, she conducted cognitive neuroscience research (with Mike Kahana at UPenn) while in high school. She's currently studying attention and visual tracking. To do this, she had to pick up a new programming language and learn the intricacies of some some specialized programming libraries; this appeared to take her about 30 minutes.
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Jinjin Sun
Research Assistant
Jinjin is a Cognitive Science major who has joined the lab to explore her interests in visual cognition. Her current research explores several facets of the perception of animacy and intentionality -- with a special focus on the perception of chasing. Her experiments are fun; rather than paying subjects to participate, we're considering charging them an hourly rate.
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Lab Alumni
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Nick Turk-Browne (Personal Homepage)
P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2009); Co-advised with Marvin Chun
After Yale: Assistant Professor, Princeton University, Department of Psychology
While in the lab from 2004 to 2009, Nick studied visual perception, learning, and attention, and made several discoveries related to the nature of implicit visual statistical learning. Nick, now a Professor at Princeton, also lured Brian into being involved with his studies of the neural basis of such things using fMRI; in related news, hell has frozen over.
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Joshua New (Personal Homepage)
P&C Lab: Postdoctoral Fellow (2005-2009)
After Yale: Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Department of Psychology
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, now a Professor at Barnard, was a postdoc, so his picture gets a border.
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Jonathan Flombaum (Personal Homepage)
P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2008)
After Yale: Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins, Dept. of Psych. & Brain Sciences
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, though; in related news, the hip-hop savviness of the lab just plummeted.
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Erik Cheries (Personal Homepage)
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, UMass Amherst, Dept. of Psychology
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, now a professor at UMass Amherst, has more songs on his iPod than you do.
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Hoon Choi
P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2006)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston University, Vision Sciences Lab
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 postdoc at Boston University, working with Takeo Watanabe.
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Steve Mitroff (Lab Page)
P&C Lab: Postdoctoral Fellow (2002-2005)
After Yale: Assistant Professor, Duke University, Dept. of Psychology & Neuroscience
While in the lab from 2002 to 2005, Steve made discoveries and published papers on topics including visual awareness, motion-induced blindness, object persistence, and object files -- often studying both infants and adults. He's now running his own lab at Duke. We miss him, though Brian is also happy to be free of Steve's strict ban on using obscure latin phrases in papers.
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Some Recent Collaborators
Neighbors
Affiliate and Undergraduate Alumni
Want to join the team?
If you're interested in joining the lab, please send a note to Brian Scholl by email. Undergraduates who are interested in RA positions might want to check out this information page. Note that this is not our lab logo.
Some of the material on this web site, and those it links to, is based on work supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of these agencies.
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Lab party @ Brian's house (April 2009)
