Affiliate and Undergraduate Alumni


 
Affiliates
 
Qi Lin
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Chun Lab) (2018-2022)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Hakwan Lau lab
 
Qi worked with us in graduate school on a project exploring the properties that determine how memorable images are, and she discovered the existence of purely visual memorability in the absence of semantic content (which she studied by exploring memories for various kinds of phase-scrambled images). Qi, who is really good at telling stories, is now studying consciousness while working in Hakwan Lau's lab.
 
Adam Bear (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Bloom Lab) (2015-2018)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University, Cushman Lab
 
Adam worked with us in graduate school on the nature of conscious visual awareness, and he showed how we can be aware of statistical properties without being aware of individual feature values. Before Yale, Adam studied both philosophy and cognitive science at Brown University. One of the people in this photo is Adam Bear; the other is just a bear.
 
Jonathan Kominsky (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Keil Lab) (2011-2016)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University, Carey Lab
Currently: Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, Central European University
 
Jonathan worked with us in graduate school on the perception of causality -- exploiting an amazing form of retinotopically-specific visual adaptation as a tool to show how causal perception comes in multiple distinct categories. Now he explores related themes in the minds of infants in his lab at CEU.
 
Brent Strickland (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Keil Lab) (2008-2013)
After Yale: Junior Researcher, CNRS, with Institut Jean Nicod
 
Brent worked with us in graduate school on the nature of core cognition, and discovered the existence of "event type" representations in adult human vision (which he reported in a 2015 JEP:General paper). He continues to collaborate with us on various projects now that he's running his own group in Paris. Brian doesn't seem quite so awful at table tennis anymore, now that Brent is gone.
 
Hauke Meyerhoff (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Visiting Graduate Student (2013)
Currently: Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Erfurt
 
Hauke joined us for a semester from Germany, shortly after he completed his PhD, having previously published on topics including multiple object tracking and perceived chasing. In collaborations with us, Hauke exploited 'causal crescents' to demonstrate (in a 2018 Cognition paper) how 'auditory-induced bouncing' is a perceptual (rather than a cognitive) phenomenon.
 
Hui Chen (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Visiting Graduate Student (2012)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Pennsylvania State University, Wyble Lab
Currently: Professor of Psychology, Zhejiang University
 
Hui joined us for a semester as a visitor from Liqiang Huang's lab, where he explored visual awareness, object persistence, and object-based attention. With us, Hui discovered several exciting new phenomena involving the relationship between visual working memory and motion-induced blindness.
 
George Newman (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Keil Lab) (2004-2008)
After Yale: Assistant Professor, Yale SoM, Organizational Behavior
Currently: Associate Professor, Rotman SoM, University of Toronto
 
George worked with us in graduate school on the perception of causality and animacy, in both infants and adults, and he discovered the within-the-bar bias. Now working in management, he continues to collaborate with us on the perception of design. For his initial work in our lab, George underwent thorough on-the-job training.
 
Justin Junge (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Chun Lab) (2004-2008)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Tufts University, Dennett group
Currently: Senior Lecturer, Princeton, Dept. of Psychology
 
Justin worked with us in graduate school on various forms of visual statistical learning. Committed to interdisciplinary training, he then headed off to study philosophy and psychology with Dan Dennett. In this photo, Justin is training to operate one of our important pieces of laboratory equipment.
 
Nicholaus Noles (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Keil Lab) (2002-2008)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, U of Michigan, Concepts & Theories lab
Currently: Associate Professor of Psychology, U of Louisville
 
Nic's PhD research at Yale explored the nature of higher-level conceptual intuitions involving object persistence. With our group, though, he also delved down to explore how the visual system traffics in such such concepts. This resulted in several papers reporting work with the 'object reviewing' paradigm.
 
Ohad Ben-Shahar (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Zucker Lab) (2001-2004)
After Yale: Senior Lecturer, Ben Gurion University, Dept. of Computer Science
Currently: Professor of Computer Science, Ben Gurion University
 
Ohad was a postdoc in Computer Science, working in Steve Zucker's group. One day he accidently wandered into the psychology building, though, and we didn't let him leave for years. His CS work involved texture flows, and together we explored how attention spreads through various types of textures.
 
Kristy vanMarle (Lab Page)
P&C Lab: Lab Affiliate (& Grad Student w/ Wynn Lab) (2001-2004)
After Yale: Postdoctoral Fellow, Rutgers, Gallistel & Gelman labs
Currently: Associate Professor of Psychology, Univ. of Missouri-Columbia
 
Fed up with all this talk about 'objects this' and 'objects that', Kristy rebelled in our lab and explored some striking limitations on our ability to attend to non-solid substances. Her work in this area culminated in a 2003 Psychological Science paper on this topic, which involved cool demos.

Undergraduates
 
Vivian Wang
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2020-2023)
After Yale: Harvard Medical School
 
Vivian's exploration of cognitive science drew inspiration from film, and she was particularly interested in our perception of time and events. With us, she showed (in a first-authored PB&R paper) how the mere anticipation of an event boundary is sufficient to effectively 'flush' visual working memory and cause adaptive forgetting. For this work, she quickly became our resident Sweet Home 3D enthusiast.
 
Rui Zhe Goh
P&C Lab: Visiting Undergraduate RA (2019)
After Yale: Senior at Yale-NUS College
Currently: Graduate Student, Johns Hopkins University, Dept. of Philosophy
 
Rui Zhe started his research career at Yale-NUS College, where he worked with Chris Asplund. During the spring and summer he spent at Yale, he took a course on Social Perception with us, and he then started up several projects with us involving ... social perception -- including studies of perceived animacy and the perception of race.
 
Adam Lowet
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2015-2018)
After Yale: Graduate student, Harvard Medical School, Program in Neuroscience
 
Adam previously explored the functional dynamics of voltage-gated potassium channels at NIH. This naturally led him to our lab, where he discovered that visual similarity is influenced by 'shape skeletons' -- a discovery that formed the core of his senior thesis and a 2018 paper in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. Adam is going to bring brain science and mind science together.
 
Julian DeFreitas (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2010-2013)
After Yale: Rhodes Scholar @ Oxford
Currently: Assistant Professor of Marketing, Harvard Business School
 
Julian spent most of his time at Yale singing with various a capella groups, including the Whiffenpoofs. In his spare time, though, he also discovered the phenomenon of attentional rhythm, published his thesis in JEP:General, and won Yale's Alpheus Henry Snow Prize (oh, and a Rhodes scholarship).
 
Samantha Ellner
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2007-2011)
After Yale: Harvard Business School
 
Sam was a double-major in economics and cognitive science who had conducted cognitive neuroscience research even before arriving at Yale. In her work with us, she showed -- contrary to many other studies -- that multiple object tracking necessarily involves extrapolating object trajectories. Sam is also an investment banker now, but please don't tell anyone.
 
Jinjin Sun
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2009-2011)
After Yale: Exploring her artistic interests
 
Jinjin made several discoveries with us about how perceived animacy influences downstream behavior -- especially how subtle cues to the direction of intention can yield automatic avoidance behavior in dynamic video-game-like tasks. Her experiments were so fun that she considered charging an hourly rate rather than paying her participants -- which isn't quite always the experience our observers have.
 
Riana Betzler (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2007-2010)
Currently: Assistant Professor of Philosophy, San Jose State University
 
Riana somehow arrived at Yale having already conducted her own cognitive psychology experiments, and this momentum led her to make several discoveries in the lab about the nature of statistical learning -- focusing on how well it does (and doesn't) operate over stimuli that are better approximations of linguistic input than are typically used in such studies.
 
Phillip Isola (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA (2005-2008)
After Yale: Graduate student, MIT, Brain & Cognitive Sciences
Currently: Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, MIT
 
In his copious free time in between majoring in Computer Science, studying computer graphics, and juggling dangerous things, Phillip conducted studies of visual statistical learning with us, and published them in JEP:LMC. Phillip, now a professor at MIT, speaks C better than most of us speak English.
 
Maya Shankar (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2004-2007)
After Yale: Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University, Dept. of Experimental Psychology
Later: Senior Policy Advisor, White House Office of Science & Tech Policy
 
Maya made several discoveries in our lab related to topological theories of perception and object representation. After winning a Rhodes Scholarship and Yale's Alpheus Snow prize, she headed off to continue her studies of cognitive science at Oxford. Don't call her "Tunnel Girl", or you'll be in big trouble.
 
Alex White (Homepage)
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2004-2007)
After Yale: Graduate student, NYU, Carrasco Lab
Currently: Assistant Professor of Neuroscience & Behavior, Barnard College
 
Before joining our lab, Alex had conducted research on monkeys and human infants, and he was excited to experiment on subjects that wouldn't scream, cry, bite, scratch, or vomit during testing. (Or so he hoped.) He made several discoveries with us related to inattentional blindness.
 
Alexandria Marino
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2002-2005)
After Yale: MD/PhD student, Yale INP Program
 
Alexandria completed her senior thesis in the lab in 2005, exploring the role of perceptual closure in defining the 'objects' of object-based attention. She also published the study in Perception & Psychophysics along the way. Outside of the lab, Alexandria played classical/rock/folk fiddle, built houses for Habitat, and biked across the country. After exploring the mind in college, she started exploring the brain in medical school.
 
Rachel Sussman
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2002-2004)
After Yale: Graduate Student, Harvard University, Jiang Lab
 
Rachel is neither a mean person nor an average person, but in our lab she studied our ability to extract mean values and average statistics from scenes, in the form of visual 'statistical summary representations'. This work formed the core of her senior thesis, and a VSS presentation.
 
Dawn Chan
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2002-2003)
After Yale: Fulbright Scholar, University of Zurich, AI Lab
 
Dawn's senior thesis explored new tools for measuring the perception of animacy, and her later collaborative work with us involved computational modeling of multiple object tracking. After Yale Dawn headed to exotic Zurich on a Fulbright, studying neural nets in an AI Lab. At Yale, Dawn also studied creative writing and performed around campus in an all-female punk-rock band.
 
Gabriel Nevarez
P&C Lab: Undergraduate RA & Senior Thesis Student (2001-2002)
After Yale: RA, University of Illinois, Simons Lab
 
Gabe's senior thesis explored the rules used by the visual system to track objects through periods of occlusion, and in particular our ability in a multiple-object tracking task to track objects through various kinds of speed discontinuities. Gabe also worked in the lab as a programmer over the summer of 2001, when he occasionally left the lab before 7 am.