Hello and Welcome!

On the Job Market (2026-2027)

About Me

I’m a fourth-year Psychology PhD student at WashU, working with Dr. Jeff Zacks. I completed the Cognitive, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience Pathway and hold a Graduate Certificate in Quantitative Data Analysis.

Research Focus

My current research focuses on how people build and update mental representations during dynamic perception. Specifically, I investigate:

• What these mental models contain
• What triggers their updates
• How those updates unfold—are they incremental or global?
• Whether people can reliably perceive goal changes and action changes
• Whether performing those actions might (or might not) enhance their perception and memory

To address these questions, I combine behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, and computational modeling.

Academic Background

My interest in using computational approaches to study cognition was sparked by the Neuromatch Academy online summer school in cognitive neuroscience, where I was a student in 2020 and a TA in 2021.

Prior to this, I was in Dr. Nicole Landi’s Lab applying imaging genetics methods to understand the mechanisms of dyslexia. I earned my bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Psychology from Cornell University, where I collaborated with Dr. Khena Swallow.

Personal Interests

When I’m not brainstorming or number-crunching, I write essays in both Chinese and English and bake cakes that are as much a science experiment as a treat. Check out my cake gallery for a peek at my baking escapades.

Research Program

Inferring Mental Processes from Gaze Patterns

Can we decode cognitive processes by analyzing where people look? This line of research explores how gaze patterns during natural viewing reveal our internal models of the world.

Project 1: Link Between CLIP Model Embeddings and Gaze Patterns in Movies

Key Findings:

• Inverting frames preserves low-level image properties but distorts semantic information
• Inverted frames show worse alignment with action descriptions compared to upright frames
• Inverting frames leads to more errors in predicting people’s gaze patterns, suggesting semantic information is critical for where people look when viewing movies

This research demonstrates that high-level semantic understanding, not just visual features, drives viewers’ attention patterns during film watching. Read the full research update

Current Direction: Apply this research pipeline to investigate other properties proposed to influence viewers’ gaze patterns.

Project 2: Predictive Looking Errors in Everyday Activities

Key Findings:

• Viewers predict actors’ hand movements up to 9 seconds in advance
• Predictive looking errors align with computational model’s prediction errors
• Increased prediction errors occur at event boundaries

This provides strong evidence that prediction errors drive how we segment continuous experience into discrete events. Read the full research update

Current Direction: Investigating how mental models update (incrementally vs. globally) and whether gaze patterns reveal hierarchical structures in our cognitive representations.

News & Highlights

2024

• June: Passed subject matter exam about global versus incremental updating for event representation. Please stay tuned for the manuscript!
• May: Presented a talk on the ‘Predictive Looking and Predictive Looking Error’ project at VSS 2024

2023

• December: Received a research grant for my action project from The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at WashU
• August: Successful defense of my Master’s thesis

2022

• May: Honored to receive the Graduate Conference Award at the Psychonomic Conference for my project “Predictive Looking and Predictive Looking Error in Everyday Activities”

2021

• August: Started my PhD journey, collaborating with Dr. Jeff Zacks

2019

• August: Joined the Haskins Lab as a Research Assistant under Dr. Nicole Landi
• May: Graduated from Cornell University with degrees in Psychology and Economics