We're excited to welcome a new postdoctoral fellow to our group: Dawei Bai! Dawei recently earned his PhD from the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he worked in Brent Strickland's lab. Dawei is the creator of the Double Ring Illusion, and has already studied all sorts of fascinating topics, including the perception of physical solidity, the perception of gravity, and the nature of core knowledge. With us, he plans to explore connections between intuitive physics and social perception. (October 2023)

The lab had a fun Broadway excursion! (June 2023)

Congratulations to current lab postdoctoral fellow (and former lab graduate student from 2017-2022) Joan Ongchoco, who was just awarded the James B. Grossman Dissertation Prize, given annually to the best doctoral dissertation in Psychology at Yale! Joan received this well-deserved honor for her dissertation on The continuous vs. the discrete in mental life: Studies in perception, attention, and decision-making. Stay tuned for several other papers from this award-winning dissertation, which will appear soon! (May 2023)

The lab had a fabulous time at VSS 2023! (May 2023)

Yet more exciting job news: Congratulations to lab postdoc (and lab graduate student from 2017 to 2022) Joan Ongchoco, who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia! Joan will start up her own lab there in the fall of 2024 (if we let her go). (Another example of "one door closing, and another door opening" -- per the amazing congratulatory video made by her labmates when she earned her Ph.D. last year!) (March 2023)

More exciting job news: Congratulations to former lab graduate student (from 2016 to 2021) Clara Colombatto, who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo! Clara will move (from her current postdoc position with Steve Fleming at UCL) to start up her own lab there in January, 2024. (And stay tuned for some exciting new collaborative papers coming out soon on the perception of attention!) (March 2023)

Exciting job news: Congratulations to former lab graduate student Stefan Uddenberg, who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign! Stefan will move (from his current postdoc position with Alex Todorov at the University of Chicago) to start up his own lab there in the fall of 2024. (And we also have some exciting new collaborative papers coming out soon on perception and intuitive physics!) (March 2023)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Kim Wong, who has received a 2023 National Eye Institute Early Career Scientist Travel Grant to help support her trip to this summer's Vision Sciences Society meeting. At VSS, Kim will be presenting on projects involving (1) the memories that are formed by dynamic visual routines, (2) how the "unfinishedness" of dynamic events is spontaneously extracted in visual processing (in a new type of 'Visual Zeigarnik Effect'; with Joan Ongchoco), (3) how event boundaries can be formed even by unnoticed changes in implicit visual statistics (with Pranava Dhar and Joan Ongchoco), and (4) how we perceive precarity (beyond instability) in block towers (with Aalap Shah). (March 2023)

Brian was excited to give an invited talk this month -- on "Regularity, multiple realizability, and a naive metaphysics of computation" -- at the Metaphysics of Computation session at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Pittsburgh. We had some fun interdisciplinary interactions with fellow panelists including Laurie Paul, Jonathan Schaffer, and Josh Tenenbaum. (November 2022)

We're excited to welcome a new graduate student to our lab: Huichao Ji! Huichao joins us from Sun Yat-sen University in China, where she worked in Xiaowei Ding's lab. She claims to be just starting a PhD program this month, but Brian suspects that she may actually be a tenured professor who is playing a trick on him: somehow, she has already published papers on topics including visual awareness, visual search, top-down effects on perception, and visual affordances -- oh, and a first-authored paper in JEP:HPP last year on attention and biological motion. So Brian hopes that Yale won't give her a PhD for at least a year or two, so that we can do some research together first! (August 2022)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Joan Ongchoco, who just successfully defended her PhD dissertation on The continuous vs. the discrete in mental life: Studies in perception, attention, and decision-making! But luckily for us, Joan -- now Dr. Ongchoco! -- won't be leaving us quite yet, as she transitions to a postdoctoral role in the lab. To help her celebrate, her labmates produced another amazing congratulatory video, inspired by Joan's work on how walking through doorways (as a type of event boundary) affects perception, attention, and memory. (August 2022)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student Clara Colombatto, who was just awarded the James B. Grossman Dissertation Prize, given annually to the best doctoral dissertation in Psychology at Yale! Clara received this well-deserved honor for her dissertation (successfully defended late last year) on From eyes to minds: Perceiving perception and attending to attention. We were lucky that Clara -- er, Dr. Colombatto! -- was able to stick around Yale as a postdoctoral fellow afterwards, but soon she'll be off to do a second postdoc with Steve Fleming's Metacognitive Neuroscience Lab at University College London. We'll remember her fun goodbye dinner and the hit music video that her dissertation work inspired! (June 2022)

The lab had a blast at VSS 2022 -- finally in person again! (May 2022)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Kim Wong, who has just received a Prize Teaching Fellowship in recognition of her amazing abilities and accomplishments as a teaching fellow. This is a huge honor (and comes with a nice payday!), which relatively few Psychology students have won over the years. Quoting the prize announcement: "This award, which recognizes your outstanding talent for our central common activity, is one of the highest honors that a graduate student can attain at Yale." Hooray! (May 2022)

This semester, Brian and Laurie Paul are excited to be co-teaching a seminar at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science: Metaphysics Meets Cognitive Science. We'll be exploring the intersection of psychological and philosophical work on several core issues in our fields -- including the nature (in both the mind and the world) of space, time, objects, events, causality, and persistence. For this semester, the seminar will also be serving as the Shulman Seminar in Science and the Humanities, and as part of this, several eminent colleagues will be visiting the course, and also delivering public talks to the wider Yale community. These visitors will include David Chalmers, Ian Phillips, Liz Spelke, and Josh Tenenbaum. (January 2022)

We're excited to welcome a new graduate student to our lab: Merve Erdogan! Merve joins us from Koc University (and previously Bogazici University) in Turkey, where she worked in Fuat Balci's Timing & Decision Making Lab. She is already taking us in exciting new directions here at Yale, as she is exploring new research topics including temporal recalibration and connections between causal perception and causal reasoning. We are excited to have this new colleague and perspective with us! (September 2021)

Congratulations to several former lab members and affiliates who are starting up their own labs now/soon! Jonathan Kominsky, who with our lab pioneered the study of causal perception(s) with retinotopic adaptation (as in his 2020 Cognition paper), will be starting up a lab at the CEU's Cognitive Development Center in 2022. And some former undergraduate RAs have also just started up their own labs: Alex White has just started up his own lab as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Behavior at Barnard College, and Julian de Freitas has just started as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School. (Brian is psyched about this, even though it's starting to make him feel old as more of his former undergraduate collaborators become professors.) (August 2021)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Joan Ongchoco, who has won the 2021 William James Prize for the best graduate student project presented at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology -- for her work on Figments of imagination: 'Scaffolded attention' creates non-sensory object and event representations! Stay tuned for several exciting new papers on this phenomenon. (It is also especially meaningful to Brian to have another student from our lab win this prize, since this was the very first award that he ever received in his career -- now more than two decades ago!) (July 2021)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Clara Colombatto, who just successfully defended her PhD dissertation on From eyes to minds: Perceiving perception and attending to attention! And luckily for us, Clara -- er, Dr. Colombatto! -- will be staying close to home as she starts up a postdoctoral fellowship here at Yale in Molly Crockett's Lab, after which she'll move to another postdoctoral position in Steve Fleming's Metacognitive Neuroscience Lab at University College London. To help her celebrate, her labmates produced an amazing congratulatory video, inspired by Clara's work on gaze shifts. (July 2021)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Joan Ongchoco, who has been awarded one of only 5 Professional Development Awards from the 2020 Object Perception, Memory, and Attention meeting -- an impressive accomplishment, since this year there were nearly 100 virtual presentations! (At this year's OPAM meeting, Joan has four different presentations with various co-authors.) And this honor comes relatively hot on the heels of an Elsevier/Vision Research Travel Award from the Vision Sciences Society, which Joan was also awarded back in May. Kudos! (November 2020)

Brian is excited to be giving an invited talk -- on "Roots of aesthetic experience in visual processing?" -- at this month's annual (virtual) meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. (November 2020)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student Hannah Raila, who has accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California - Santa Cruz! At UCSC, Hannah has founded the Emotion, Cognition, & Psychopathology Lab. (April 2020)

The February issue of the APS Observer features a nice cover article (on "Perception and Cognition: Is there Really a Distinction?") that covers some of our lab's work (complete with an awkward photo), along with other research by Aude Oliva, Ned Block, John McGann, and Yael Niv. (February 2020)

For the 33rd Annual Julia Norton Babson Lecture at the Montclair Art Museum, Brian will be talking about "The science of seeing" as part of a live conversation with amazing sculptor Larry Kagan. (October 2019)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Clara Colombatto, who has been racking up the travel awards this year, in recognition of her research on social perception. First, she was selected to receive an Elsevier/Vision Research Travel Award from the Vision Sciences Society, for this past summer's meeting (where she presented her work on "Unconscious pupillometry: Faces with dilated pupils gain preferential access to visual awareness"). And just now she was selected to receive an OPAM 27 Travel Award from the Object Perception, Attention, & Memory meeting, for the upcoming conference in Montreal (where she'll be presenting her work on "Unconscious attentional contagion"). Kudos! (September 2019)

We're excited to welcome two new graduate students to our lab: Robert Walter and Kim Wong! Robert joins us from UCSD, where he studied visual working memory in Tim Brady's lab. He is interested in exploring various issues at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, and is a member of Yale's joint Psychology/Philosophy PhD program. (Congratulations to Robert for winning a 2019 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation!) Kim joins us from Johns Hopkins, where she studied the perception of writing in Mike McCloskey's lab. She is interested in many topics in visual perception and cognition, from causality to inattentional blindness. (Kim is the first incoming graduate student Brian has ever had whose published work he had already taught to hundreds of students in his Intro to Cognitive Science course -- without even knowing she was an undergraduate!) We are so excited to have these new colleagues and perspectives with us! (September 2019)

Exciting: Former lab graduate student Ben van Buren has just launched his own lab in NYC at the New School for Social Research! (September 2019)

Later this month, on 7/25, Brian will give a public talk in Philadelphia for One Day University, titled Do my eyes deceive me? The science of visual awareness. This talk is part of an exciting line-up of speakers that also features Kenneth Miller and Heather Berlin. (July 2019)

Congratulations to incoming lab graduate student Robert Walter, who has been selected to receive a 2019 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation! We are excited to welcome Robert to the lab this fall. (April 2019)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student and current collaborator Stefan Uddenberg, who has been selected to receive an NEI Early Career Scientist Travel Grant to support his visit next month to the Vision Sciences Society -- where he'll be presenting his work with our lab on "The speed of demography in face perception"! (April 2019)

Congratulations to visiting undergraduate Rui Zhe Goh, who has been selected to receive a Summer Research Program grant from Yale-NUS College in Singapore, to fund his continued explorations of social perception in our lab over the coming summer! (March 2019)

Brian is excited to be speaking in an Integrative Science Symposium (with others including Ned Block and Aude Oliva) on how perception relates to cognition in March, at the 2019 International Convention of Psychological Science in Paris. He'll be presenting there on how: "Distinguishing between seeing and thinking helps to reveal how the mind works". And he'll also giving a talk at the pre-conference Teaching Institute on "Teaching seeing: Visual perception as a case study for how to introduce students to cognitive science". (January 2019)

The lab had a blast at VSS this month! (May 2018)

Brian is excited to be giving one of the keynote presentations this summer at the Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision, in Hangzhou, China! (April 2018)

Wow: Congratulations to three lab graduate students who all successfully defended their PhD dissertations this month! Stefan Uddenberg, who defended his work on TeleFace: Exploring face representations with the method of serial reproduction, will be heading off this summer to continue studying social perception as a postdoctoral fellow in Alex Todorov's Lab at Princeton. Hannah Raila, who defended her work on Seeing and feeling: Novel links between visual attention and emotion, will soon be starting a postdoc to explore connections between OCD and mechanisms of visual attention in Carolin Rodriguez's lab at Stanford. And Ben van Buren, who defended his work on Seeing minds in motion: The nature of perceived animacy, will soon be doing some postdoctoral work on perceptual organization in Johan Wagemans' lab in Leuven -- after which he'll be starting his own lab as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Psychology at The New School in NYC. (April 2018)

Brian is excited to share the lab's work on how seeing relates to thinking during the keynote dialogue -- Two views, one vision: Does cognition penetrate perception? -- at this month's ECVP meeting in Berlin! (August 2017)

Welcome to new graduate student Joan Ongchoco! Joan joins us most recently from Singapore, where she worked in Chris Asplund's Cognition and Attention lab and graduated as part of the inaugural class at Yale-NUS College. She is interested in event perception and time perception (among many other things), and she appears to have the power to switch the usual temporal order of events: though only arriving this month, she has already published at least one paper on statistical learning with one of her new labmates. We're looking into how this is possible, but in the meantime we're excited to welcome Joan to the lab. (August 2017)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student Tao Gao, who has accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication and Statistics at UCLA! (August 2017)

Congratulations to former lab undergraduate Phillip Isola, who has accepted a position (to start in 2018) as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in MIT's EECS Department! (August 2017)

Next month, on 9/23, Brian will give a public talk in Providence, RI for One Day University, titled Do my eyes deceive me? The science of visual awareness. (August 2017)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Yi-Chia Chen, who just successfully defended her PhD dissertation on New frontiers in the study of visual experience: Aesthetics and history! Yi-Chia -- or should we say: Dr. Chen -- will soon be off to start a postdoctoral fellowship in the Harvard Vision Sciences Laboratory, working with George Alvarez. (July 2017)

The lab had a blast at VSS this month! (May 2017)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Chaz Firestone! At this past weekend's commencement ceremonies, Chaz received not only his Ph.D. (titled, like his recent BBS paper, Cognition Does Not Affect Perception), but also the James B. Grossman Dissertation Prize, given annually to the best doctoral dissertation in Psychology at Yale! Chaz is now off to start his own lab as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. (May 2017)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Hannah Raila, who has just won the 2017 Outstanding Student Teacher Award from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology! (April 2017)

Everyone in the lab is excited that Princeton professor (and former lab graduate student) Nick Turk-Browne will be moving his lab back to Yale this year! (January 2017)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student Jon Flombaum for earning tenure at Johns Hopkins! (November 2016)

Congratulations to Emily Ward, who -- after defending her PhD dissertation earlier this year -- has now accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison! Emily will start up her own lab there in 2018. (September 2016)

Later this month, on 9/25, Brian will give a public talk in Washington, DC for One Day University, titled Do my eyes deceive me? The science of visual awareness. (September 2016)

Next month, Brian will give one of the keynote addresses -- titled Let's see what happens: Dynamic events as foundational units of perception and cognition -- at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Philadelphia. (July 2016)

The lab had a blast at VSS this month! (May 2016)

Congratulations to Emily Ward, who recently defended her PhD dissertation on Seeing and Not Seeing: Investigating the Foundations of Perception! (May 2016)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Chaz Firestone, who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. We can't bear to let him go quite yet, though, so Chaz will stay in the lab for one more year, and will start his new position in the summer of 2017. (April 2016)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student Nick Turk-Browne, who has just been named as the 2016 winner of the Young Investigator Award from the Vision Sciences Society! (March 2016)

Next month, on 4/12, Brian will engage in a dialogue with Nancy Kanwisher on How -- and how much -- do fMRI studies contribute to psychology?. This dialogue will take place at Northwestern University, under the auspices of their Cognitive Science program. (March 2016)

Later this month, on 10/25, Brian will give a public talk in New York City for One Day University, titled Do my eyes deceive me? The science of visual awareness. (October 2015)

Next week, on 9/22, during Yale's weekly 'Current Work in Cognitive Psychology' meeting, Brian will give a joint presentation with Greg Samanez-Larkin on The Science and Practice of Graphing Data. (September 2015)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Yi-Chia Chen for (once again!) winning a Student Travel Award from this summer's Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision. (June 2015)

Check out this interactive version of the authorship network for VSS for the last 14 years -- designed by lab member Emily Ward as part of her project to design the cover of the VSS program this year! This network contains well over 10,000 authors and more than 40,000 co-author relationships, so it may take some time to load and run; mobile devices beware. Each node is a unique author -- so if you've presented at VSS, one of them is you! (May 2015)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Stefan Uddenberg, who has been selected to receive a 2015 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, awarded in part on the basis of his ongoing work on serial reproduction and face perception! (April 2015)

Congratulations to undergraduate researcher Adam Lowet, who has been selected to receive a 2015 Yale College Freshman Summer Research Fellowship in the Sciences and Engineering, awarded to support his work in the lab this coming summer on the nature of shape representation and awareness! (April 2015)

On a new episode of Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel -- Memory (first airing on 2/16) -- Brian talks about working memory, chunking, and spreading activation. (February 2015)

On Thursday 1/8, Brian will give one of the keynote addresses -- titled Core knowledge grows up -- at the BCCCD conference in Budapest. (January 2015)

Later this week (on Thurs 12/4, at 4:30 pm), Brian will have a public debate with Gary Lupyan (moderated by Ned Block and Dave Chalmers) about the possibility of 'top-down' effects on visual perception. This will take place at NYU (at 5 Washington Place, room 202), as an NYU Center for Mind, Brain, & Consciousness event. (December 2014)

A new research topic for the lab: UFOs? (July 2014)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Yi-Chia Chen, whose poster at this month's Vision Sciences Society meeting won one of the Best Poster Awards (from a session with 150+ posters!). Yi-Chia's poster, titled Seeing and liking from the outside in: Consistent inward biases in visual perception and aesthetic preferences explored several ways in which what we like interacts with what we see -- in phenomena including ambiguous figure perception and inattentional blindness. (May 2014)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student Nick Turk-Browne (Ph.D., 2009) for earning tenure at Princeton! (May 2014)

Congratulations to several grad students in the lab for earning travel awards to summer conferences! Yi-Chia Chen has won a Student Travel Award from the Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision, and both Emily Ward and Chaz Firestone have won Student Travel Awards from the Vision Sciences Society. (May 2014)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Ben van Buren, who has been selected to receive a 2014 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, awarded in part on the basis of his work on the perception of animacy and intentionality! (April 2014)

On a new episode of Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel -- What's Going On? -- Brian talks about change blindness, inattentional blindness, spatial awareness, and Double Dutch. (February 2014)

In the season premiere of the new season of Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel -- In Living Color -- Brian talks about color, reflectance, and visual adaptation. This episode includes a special performance by Fighting Gravity. (January 2014)

On a new episode of Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel -- Battle of the Ages -- Brian talks about visual attention, auditory perception, and memory -- all in the context of aging. (November 2013)

Welcome to new graduate student Stefan Uddenberg! Stefan joins us after working as a research assistant in Won Mok Shim's lab at Dartmouth University, where he also earned a BA in cognitive science, and is rumored to have done some a capella singing. Stefan hails originally from Trinidad and Tobago; we don't yet know how good his limbo is. Here at Yale, Stefan is preparing to study interactions between visual, auditory, and emotional processing. (August 2013)

Congratulations to Alice Albrecht, who recently defended her PhD dissertation on The Scope and Flexibility of Perceptual Averaging! Later this summer, Alice will transition her research program to a new home, as she begins an appointment as postdoctoral fellow in David Whitney's Perception and Action Lab in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley. (July 2013)

Congratulations to lab affiliate Brent Strickland, who recently defended his PhD dissertation on Core Cognition Operates Automatically and Unconsciously in Adults: Three Case Studies! Brent is now off to continue to this work as a postdoctoral fellow in Paris (working in part with Patrick Cavanagh), supported by a grant from the Fyssen Foundation. (July 2013)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Chaz Firestone, whose paper on the "El Greco Fallacy" in perception research (now in press at Psychological Science) has won the William James Prize for the best graduate student paper presented at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology! (June 2013)

Huge congratulations to RA and graduating senior thesis student Julian De Freitas, who had a busy Class Day during commencement! Julian's thesis (his 'attentional rhythm' project, now in-press at JEP:General) won the Angier Prize, for the best undergraduate thesis in psychology. But, as it turned out, this was only a prelude. Julian also won the most prominent prize for a graduating senior in Yale College as a whole -- the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, for "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". Hooray! Julian will soon embark on a summer of singing with the Whiffenpoofs, before heading to Oxford later this year to continue his study of perception via a Rhodes Scholarship. (May 2013)

Later this week (on Thurs 5/2, at 5 pm), Brian will have a public debate with Rebecca Saxe (moderated by George Alvarez) about The role of fMRI in Cognitive Science. This will take place at Harvard University (in Science Center D), as an MBB program event. (May 2013)

Congratulations to Brandon Liverence, who recently defended his PhD dissertation on Representations of Space and Time in Visual Cognition! Later this summer, Brandon will begin an appointment as postdoctoral fellow in Steve Franconeri's Visual Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern. There, Brandon will be funded by an individual National Research Service Award that he received (on his first attempt!) from NIH. (April 2013)

Brian explains motion-induced blindness, inattentional blindness, and the limits of peripheral vision (using cheerleaders!) on the new show Brain Games from National Geographic. (April 2013)

Welcome to visiting graduate student Hauke Meyerhoff! Hauke is a visitor from Germany, where he will soon complete his PhD at the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tubingen -- where he has been exploring multiple object tracking and perceived chasing in collaboration with Markus Huff and others. Hauke is joining us for a semester to do some collaborative studies of perceived animacy. (April 2013)

Congratulations to undergraduate RA and senior thesis student Julian De Freitas, who has been named a Rhodes Scholar for the class of 2013! Julian's recent project on Attentional Rhythm: A Temporal Analogue of Object-Based Attention is now under review for publication [and has since been accepted at JEP:General], and at Oxford next year he will continue his study of cognitive science and visual perception! (December 2012)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Chaz Firestone! This year, for the first time, the annual Object Perception and Memory meeting introduced a 'Best Paper' award, and the inaugural winner is ... Chaz! He won this prize during the meeting in Minneapolis earlier this month for his presentation on 'Please tap the shape, anywhere you like': An exceedingly simple measure exposes skeletal shape representations [now in press at Psychological Science]. Kudos! (November 2012)

Welcome to new graduate student Yi-Chia Chen! Yi-Chia joins us after working as a research assistant in Su-Ling Yeh's Perception & Attention Lab at National Taiwan University. Yi-Chia is interested in perception/cognition interactions, with a particular focus on cognitive and perceptual aspects of time, and she has previously studied audiovisual integration, implicit gaze processing, and time perception. Congratulations are also in order for Yi-Chia, who has earned an International Study Scholarship from Taiwan's Ministry of Education, to help support her graduate studies at Yale. (August 2012)

Welcome to visiting graduate student Hui Chen! Hui is a visitor from Liqiang Huang's Attention & Perception Lab in the Department of Psychology of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he has been exploring visual awareness, object persistence, and object-based attention. Hui is joining us for a semester to do some collaborative studies of object persistence and motion-induced blindness. (August 2012)

Congratulations to former graduate student Tao Gao, who has just received the 2012 New Investigator Award from Division 3 of the APA, for a paper published in JEP:HPP! This well-deserved honor comes to Tao as he continues his postdoc in Josh Tenenbaum's lab at MIT. (July 2012)

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 lab graduate student 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 lab graduate student 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)

Welcome to new graduate student Emily Ward! Emily hails most recently from Russell Epstein's lab at UPenn, where she worked on neuroimaging studies of spatial cognition. Before that, she was an undergraduate at Franklin & Marshall College. Here at Yale, Emily is studying the nature of visual awareness, and is also working in Marvin Chun's lab. Congrats to Emily for being awarded a 2010 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation! (September 2010)

Brian spoke on WNPR this week about how results from vision science can shed light on aspects of M.C. Escher's art -- and vice versa. (July 2010)

Welcome to visiting postdoctoral fellow Jan Zwickel! Jan, who currently hails from the Experimental Psychology group at Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat in Germany, received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and will be with us for the next half-year, funded by a grant from the Max Planck Institute. With our group, Jan will be continuing his studies of the perception of animacy and intentionality. (June 2010)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Alice Albrecht, who has been selected to receive a 2010 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, awarded in part on the basis of her work on perceptual averaging! (Kudos also to past undergraduate collaborator and co-author Phillip Isola, who also received this award this year to support his graduate studies in the Brain & Cognitive Sciences department at MIT.) (April 2010)

Congratulations to Brian, who has been promoted to full professor at Yale, and to father at home! (March 2010)

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 lab graduate student 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 lab graduate student 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 lab postdoc 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 lab graduate student 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)

Welcome to new graduate students Alice Albrecht and Brandon Liverence! Both Alice (coming from Lynn Robertson's lab at Berkeley) and Brandon (returning to academia after a stint in the real world, after his undergraduate days at Stanford) are arriving this summer to begin their studies and their projects in the lab. (July 2008)

Congratulations to lab graduate student 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)

Congratulations to former lab graduate student Erik Cheries! After a year of postdoctoral work at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies at Harvard, he has just accepted a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UMass Amherst, where he'll be establishing his own cognitive development lab. (June 2008)

Congratulations to lab affiliate George Newman, Ph.D.! After obtaining his doctorate earlier this spring, George has accepted a postdoctoral position in the Consumer Decision Making Laboratory at the Yale School of Management. We are delighted that Dr. Newman will remain in the neighborhood, as we continue our collaborations. (June 2008)

Congratulations to lab affiliate Justin Junge, Ph.D.! Having obtained his degree in experimental psychology, the newly-minted Dr. Junge will now be focusing for a while on his theoretical interests, while he works as a postdoctoral fellow with Daniel Dennett in the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. (June 2008)

Congratulations to lab affiliate Nic Noles, Ph.D.! Having just obtained his doctoral degree, Nic will shortly be heading out to continue his studies as a postdoctoral fellow, working with Susan Gelman in the Concepts & Theories in Human Development Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. (June 2008)

Congratulations to undergraduate research assistants Riana Betzler and Samantha Ellner, each of whom 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. Riana will continue her research on visual statistical learning, and also her studies in collaboration with Laurie Santos on the tunnel effect in nonhuman primates. Sam will continue her studies of object persistence and visual tracking. (May 2008)

Congratulations to former undergraduate research assistant and senior thesis student Alex White, who has just decided to follow up on his gig as a Fulbright Scholar (working with Alex Holcombe at the University of Sydney) by attending graduate school in experimental psychology and vision research in the Department of Psychology at NYU. We look forward to having him take a trip up on Metro-North to present his latest research in our lab meetings! (May 2008)

Congratulations to Erik Cheries, Ph.D.! Earlier this month Erik defended his PhD dissertation on Constraints on Infants' Object Representations, and he 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 undergraduate RA 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 undergraduate RA 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 lab graduate student 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 entire field of psychology, so this is a great honor! (November 2006)

Congratulations to undergraduate RA 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 lab graduate student 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 undergraduate RA Maya Shankar, who has been awarded the Hart Lyman Prize -- a Yale award for "that member of the Junior Class who shall have made through his or her efforts the best record of accomplishment intellectually and socially. It is generally regarded as the most distinguished prize for a member of the junior class." Maya will now be taking over as honorary head of the lab for the next month. (September 2006)

Congratulations to lab postdoc 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 lab graduate student Hoon Choi, who recently defended his PhD dissertation on New Frontiers in Causal Perception, and who is now off to Boston University to do a postdoc in Takeo Watanabe's Vision Sciences Lab! (April 2006)

Congratulations to Maya Shankar and Alex White, both of whom have received Dean's Summer Fellowships in the Social Sciences and Humanities from Yale College, to support their research this summer in our laboratory! (April 2006)

Congratulations to several folks in the lab for earning recent conference travel awards! Nick Turk-Browne has received a Student Travel Fellowship in honor of his work on visual statistical learning, to support his trip to present this work at the Vision Sciences Society in Sarasota, FL. Maya Shankar has also received a travel grant to present her work at VSS: a Yale Science and Engineering Research Travel Prize in honor of her work on object persistence and topology. Finally, Erik Cheries has received an Early Career Award in honor of his work on object persistence, to support his trip to present this work at the International Conference on Infant Studies in Kyoto, Japan! (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)

Congratulations to lab postdoc Steve Mitroff, who has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, to begin during the summer of 2005! (April 2005)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Nick Turk-Browne, who has been awarded a Postgraduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada! (March 2005)

Congratulations to lab graduate student Jon Flombaum, who has been awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation! (July 2003)