Sophie Xing Su
Welcome 👋
I am a Cognitive Science Researcher who received my PhD from WashU, working with Dr. Jeff Zacks. My research investigates how people build, maintain, and update mental representations of ongoing events during naturalistic perception. I combine behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this process.
Featured Research Projects
Movement Analysis Dashboard
Interactive visualization for pose estimation and pantomimed action recognition research. Try the live demo!
Mental Representations from Gaze
Using CLIP vision-language models to decode semantic content from eye-tracking data during naturalistic movie viewing
Predictive Looking & Event Segmentation
How prediction errors drive event segmentation. Published in JEP: General (2025)
Research Program
My research program investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying event perception and memory. I focus on three interconnected questions:
How do mental representations guide attention? Using vision-language models (CLIP) and eye-tracking to decode semantic content from gaze patterns
What triggers event segmentation? Analyzing how prediction errors drive the parsing of continuous experience into discrete events
How are mental models updated? Testing whether event representations are updated incrementally or globally when prediction errors occur
These projects combine computational modeling, eye-tracking, fMRI, and behavioral experiments to build a unified theory of event cognition.
News & Highlights
2025
- Oct: Paper published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- May: Poster presentation at VSS 2025 (CLIP × gaze project)
2024
- June: Passed subject matter exam on global vs. incremental updating
- May: Talk at VSS 2024 (Predictive Looking project)
2023
- Dec: Departmental research grant awarded
- Aug: Master’s thesis successfully defended
Outside the Lab
I write essays in both Chinese and English and bake cakes that double as small-scale science experiments. You can contact me via xingsu1996@gmail.com
