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

Joshua New (Email, Personal Homepage) Postdoctoral Fellow   Josh is interested in how animate and inanimate objects (e.g. people and animals, vs. plants and artifacts) are distinguished in memory, perception, and underlying neural architecture -- especially how social information is categorically privileged via attention. His current work in our lab explores these topics in normal adults and also in children with autism spectrum disorder. He also studies the subjective experience of time. Josh is a postdoc, so his picture gets a border.

Alice Albrecht (Email) Graduate Student; Also in Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab   Alice joined our group in the fall of 2008, hailing from Lynn Robertson's group at Berkeley. She is interested in how humans perceive objects and in the neural substrates of this ability. Her previous research at Berkeley was full of holes -- that is, it involved the study of perceived holes as possible candidates for effects of object-based attention. With us, she's now exploring event perception and 'statistical summary representations' in visual perception.

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 better title than any of our other papers: The Psychophysics of Chasing. 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.

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. He just arrived in the lab in the summer of 2008, yet he is somehow already studying all of this. Brandon's past is mysterious; rumors suggest that he was once a Stanford student, an archaeologist, a marine biologist, and a pharmaceutical consultant.

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 also recently lured Brian into being involved with his studies of the neural basis of such things using fMRI; in related news, hell has just frozen over.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Next Year: 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.

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.

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.

George Alvarez	(Harvard University)
Dick Aslin	(University of Rochester)
Marvin Chun	(Yale University)
Matt Doran	(University of Delaware)
Lisa Feigenson	(Johns Hopkins University)
Jacob Feldman	(Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science)
Steve Franconeri	(Northwestern University)
Jim Hoffman	(University of Delaware)
Marcia Johnson	(Yale University)
Ami Klin	(Yale University, Child Study Center)
Alan Leslie	(Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science)
Greg McCarthy	(Yale University)
Jacques Mehler	(SISSA)
Steve Most	(University of Delaware)
Ken Nakayama	(Harvard University)
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	(Yale University)
Karen Wynn	(Yale University)
Do-Joon Yi	(Yonsei University)
Steve Zucker	(Yale University)

Automaticity Lab	(John Bargh)
Cognition & Decision-Making Lab	(Daeyeol Lee)
Cognition & Development Lab	(Frank Keil)
Comparative Cognition Lab	(Laurie Santos)
Computational Vision Group	(Steve Zucker)
Consumer Decision Making Lab	(Ravi Dhar, Nathan Novemsky)
Developmental Disabilities Group	(Ami Klin, Fred Volkmar, et al.)
Developmental Neuroimaging Lab	(Kevin Pelphrey)
Experimental Philosophy	(Joshua Knobe)
Haskins Laboratories	(Carol Fowler, Bruno Repp, et al.)
Human Neuroscience Lab	(Greg McCarthy)
Infant Cognition Lab	(Karen Wynn)
Memory & Cognition Lab	(Marcia Johnson)
Mind & Development Lab	(Paul Bloom)
Philosophical Psychology	(Tamar Gendler)
Psychopathology & Cognition Lab	(Teresa Treat)
Sensory Info Processing Lab	(Larry Marks)
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab	(Jeremy Gray)
Social Robotics Lab	(Brian Scassellati)
Thinking Lab	(Woo-Kyoung Ahn)
Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab	(Marvin Chun)
Visual Neuroscience Lab	(Jamie Mazer)