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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
- Congratulations to Erik Cheries, Ph.D.! Erik defended his PhD this month, and is now off to live the idyllic postdoctoral life, working with Susan Carey and Liz Spelke at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies at Harvard University. (June 2007)
- Congratulations to Maya Shankar, who had an unusually eventful graduation ceremony this month. Beyond earning her B.A., she was awarded the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize -- a great honor bestowed by Yale on the "senior who, through the combination of intellectual achievement, character, and personality, shall be adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring in his or her classmates an admiration and love for the best traditions of high scholarship." We wish Maya the best on the next stage of her career, as she heads to Oxford! (May 2007)
- Congratulations to Alex White, who has just been named a 2007 Fulbright Scholar! As a result, Alex will be continuing his studies of visual cognition next year at the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney in Australia, working on aspects of temporal perception with Alex Holcombe. (March 2007)
- Congratulations to Nick Turk-Browne, who has just been awarded the 2006 Science Council Early Researcher Award from the American Psychological Association -- "to recognize and reward an outstanding student research project completed before the dissertation"! Only 2-3 Early Researcher awards are given out yearly in the field of psychology, so this is a great honor!
(November 2006)
- Congratulations to Maya Shankar, who has just been named a 2007 Rhodes Scholar -- and who as a result will be studying next year at Oxford, in the Department of Experimental Psychology! (November 2006)
- Congratulations to Jon Flombaum! Not content with his 2003 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Jon has now been awarded a predoctoral National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health! (September 2006)
- Congratulations to Josh New, who has been awarded a 3-year National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health to support his postdoctoral fellowship! Josh's new award will support his work on visual cognition both in normal individuals and in autistic spectrum disorder. (September 2006)
- Congratulations to Hoon Choi, who has earned his Ph.D., and is now off to Boston University to do a postdoc in Takeo Watanabe's Vision Sciences Lab! (April 2006)
- Congratulations to everyone in the lab, for earning two recent awards from the American Psychological Association: the 2005 Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award and the 2006 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. (Well, these were technically given to Brian, but clearly they are both really due to the fantastic research of all the current and recent students in the lab, for which Brian was just a convenient proxy!) (January 2006)
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 and attention
Visual object representation and object persistence
The perception of causality and animacy; Visual statistical learning
Infants' object cognition
Foundations of cognitive science; Relating perception and cognition
Sea-kayaking as a tool for procrastination
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Postdoctoral Fellows
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Joshua New (Email)
Postdoctoral Fellow
Josh is interested in how animate and inanimate objects (e.g. people and animals, vs. plants and artifacts) are distinguished in semantic memory, visual perception, and underlying neural architecture -- especially how social information is categorically privileged via both spatial and temporal attention. His current work in our lab explores these topics in normal adults and also in children with autism spectrum disorder. He is also studying our subjective experience of time. Josh is a postdoc, so his picture gets a border.
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Graduate Students
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Jonathan Flombaum (Email, Personal Homepage)
Graduate Student
Flom is interested in the categories that we quickly and automatically assign to our perceptual experiences and in the evolution of the rules that mediate these classifications. His current projects focus on the nature of visual tracking, visual memory, and perception of the tunnel effect, in work with both adults and rhesus macaques. Jon will not be allowed the leave the lab until he learns to appreciate folk music.
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Tao Gao (Email)
Graduate Student
Tao recently joined our group from China, and is interested in studying how visual information is spatially and temporally integrated. He is currently exploring the nature of object representation, object persistence, and visual tracking. His previous research explored visual search, object-based attention and working memory, motion perception, and trans-saccadic integration. Beyond the lab, he exhibits excellent taste by reading a lot of science fiction.
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Nicholaus Noles (Email)
Graduate Student
Nic's recent studies explore the nature of object persistence, from lower-level visual processing to higher-level conceptual intuitions. His work in visual cognition has focused on the nature of mid-level 'object-file' representations, while his work in conceptual processing and philosophical intuitions has explored part replacement, as in the 'Ship of Theseus'. Nic also organizes strange occult activities (such as soccer games) for the McDougal Center.
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Nick Turk-Browne (Email, Personal Homepage)
Graduate Student; Also in Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Nick is interested in many facets of visual perception and memory, and has been exploring how subtle regularities in space and time are extracted and used to bias future perception. This work has led to several recent discoveries about the nature of visual statistical learning. Nick has a speech impediment (called "being Canadian") whereby he pronounces "z" as "zed". It is rumored that he also studies the brain.
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Affiliates
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Justin Junge
Graduate Student in Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Justin is interested in the role that awareness plays in cognition generally and vision specifically. His current research explores the necessity of attention for certain types of visual learning, and the behavioral effects of learning that occur outside of awareness. If he needs a break from grad school, Justin plans on growing a mullet and becoming a roadie for the reunion tour of any band featured on 'Monster Ballads'. In this photo, Justin is training to operate one of our important pieces of laboratory equipment.
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George Newman
Graduate Student in Infant Cognition Lab & Cognitive Development Lab
George is interested in the unique ways in which we perceive, represent, and interpret social information. His current projects in our lab explore the dynamic nature of social perception and the types of on-line predictions we make about causal, goal-directed events. He's also made several neat discoveries about infants' causal perception. In order to work in our lab, George underwent thorough on-the-job training.
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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, but apparently Morten Christiansen at Cornell had something to do with it. Riana's initial research explores how statistical learning functions in situations that closely resemble natural language.
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Phillip Isola
Research Assistant
Phillip is interested in just about all areas of visual cognition. His first project in our lab involved visual statistical learning, and he is now studying attentional selection and tracking. He also remains quite interested in several other areas of science including physics and computer science, as well as the visual arts and architecture. Outside of the lab and academics, Phillip enjoys juggling and building solar cars. Phillip speaks C and various other programming languages better than most of us speak English.
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Lab Alumni
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Erik Cheries (Personal Homepage)
P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2007); Primary advisor, Karen Wynn
Currently: Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University, Lab for Developmental Studies
While in the lab from 2002 to 2007 (working primarily with Karen Wynn), Erik ran studies with both babies and adults exploring how the visual system selects, maintains, and identifies objects over time -- and how these processes might provide a foundation for reasoning about objects. Erik, now living the high-life as a postdoc in Cambridge, has more songs on his iPod than you do.
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Hoon Choi
P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2006)
Currently: 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)
Currently: Assistant Professor, Duke University, Psychological & Brain Sciences
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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