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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 undergraduate research assistant Julian De Freitas, who has just received a Summer Fellowship from Yale's Psychology Department, to support his ongoing work this coming summer on 'attentional rhythm'! (Julian was also recently selected as a Whiffenpoof for next year, so perhaps he will sing the instructions when he runs subjects?) (March 2012)
- Our lab just got a lot cuter! Congratulations to Alice Albrecht and Perry Fetterman on the arrival of our newest lab affiliate, Atticus Albrecht Fetterman! (January 2012)
- Welcome to new graduate student Chaz Firestone! Chaz hails from Bill Warren's lab at Brown University, where he earned both a BA in cognitive science and an MA in philosophy. He has biked across the country, reported live from Antarctica, and he knows how to escape from a fox. Chaz has also done a bit of writing on the side, for venues such as Nature and the Atlantic Monthly. Here at Yale, Chaz is gearing up to study the relationships between perception and cognition. (August 2011)
- Congratulations to former lab affiliate George Newman, who is starting this month as an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale's School of Management! We're glad that he'll be just down the street from now on, so that we can continue our collaborative studies on how we can efficiently communicate information by exploiting the nature of perception. (July 2011)
- Congratulations to Tao Gao! At this past weekend's commencement ceremonies, Tao 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 2011)
- This year, Brian will be serving as the President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, delivering the keynote address at the Object Perception Attention and Memory meeting, and branching out beyond the usual venues to deliver an address at the Eastern division meeting of the other APA. (April 2011)
- Congratulations to Tao Gao, who recently defended his PhD dissertation on Visual Roots of Social Cognition: Perceiving Animacy and Intentionality, and who has just accepted an appointment as postdoctoral fellow in Josh Tenenbaum's Computational Cognitive Science Lab in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT. (April 2011)
Lab News Archive
Faculty
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Brian Scholl (Email, Personal Homepage)
Lab Director, 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, Personal Homepage)
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 we 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 perceive 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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Chaz Firestone (Email)
Graduate Student
Chaz is studying how perception and cognition interact. He is currently exploring cognitive (im)penetrability, perceptual roots of philosophical intuitions, and the psychological reality of shape skeletons. He's so excited about these things that you can literally see his brilliant thoughts. Chaz has degrees in both philosophy and cognitive science, rode his bicycle 4,000 miles during the summer before graduate school, and has probably been further south than you have.
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Brandon Liverence (Email, Personal Homepage)
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, the role of attention in object persistence (and vice versa), and the connections between phenomena such as attentional selection and ego depletion. Before joining the lab, 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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Emily Ward (Email, Personal Homepage)
Graduate Student; Also in Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Emily is interested in what visual information we can acquire without conscious awareness and how awareness contributes to representing information in the brain. She has also studied spatial cognition with Russell Epstein at the University of Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall College. When not in the lab, Emily can be found thousands of miles away, sunburned, bug-bitten, and wearing inappropriate footwear for the weather.
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Affiliates
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Jonathan Kominsky
Graduate Student, Cognition and Development Lab
Jonathan is interested in the role of time in perception, especially in the perception of causality. His current projects are focused on how people perceive very slow or gradual events, and how slow something can be and still be seen as an "event." An embarrassing number of his study ideas originate in his collection of old cartoons and Calvin & Hobbes comics. (We're not sure if this holds for his recent discovery that the temporal window of postdiction is variable.)
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Jonathan Phillips (Personal Homepage)
Graduate Student, Department of Philosophy
Jonathan is studying both philosophy and psychology (or possibly psychology and philosophy, depending on which day of the week it is), with a focus on how we perceive and understand multiple interacting agents. For example, he is currently exploring the processes that underlie the perception of one agent causing another to do something. In his spare time, Jonathan publishes papers about the nature of morality, happiness, and freedom.
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Brent Strickland
Graduate Student, Cognition and Development Lab
Brent's research program explores core cognition -- the set of early-emerging cognitive structures (relating to entities such as objects, numbers, beliefs, and intentions) that form a foundation for later learning. In particular, Brent is exploring how core cognition continues to operate into adulthood, and how it interacts with mental faculties such as vision and language. 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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Julian DeFreitas
Research Assistant
Julian's interests are highly specialized, and he only studies attention, consciousness, time perception, causal perception, intentional binding, and attentional rhythm. He ran ten experiments during his first summer in the lab, and is now picking up speed. During his first year at Yale, Julian focused on his schoolwork, and only visited 17 other countries. We think that he may be a spy sent from the group that really runs Yale (i.e the a capella community).
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Lab Alumni
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Tao Gao (Personal Homepage)
P&C Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2011)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Tenenbaum Lab
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. Tao, now a postdoc at MIT, has great taste in science fiction.
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Nick Turk-Browne (Lab Page)
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 (Lab Page)
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 has 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 (Personal Homepage)
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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