Meet the team
Fall 2025
Bria Long
Lab Director
Bria is thrilled to be an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego! She is broadly interested in how we learn to perceive our visual world so effortlessly.
​
Bria completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the Language & Cognition Lab, her Ph.D. in the Harvard Vision Lab and the Laboratory for Developmental Studies, and spent two years in the Cogmaster program at École Normale Supérieure in Paris working with Sid Kouider and Emmanuel Dupoux at LSCP. As an undergraduate, she worked with Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University.
Bria is the first academic in her family, and she is a mom of two young kids. She is committed to making science more open (transparent, reproducible, and inclusive) and in using her privilege to increase opportunities in science for people from marginalized backgrounds.
​​
AJ Haskins
Postdoctoral Researcher
A.J. recently completed her PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, advised by Dr. Caroline Robertson. Prior to graduate school, she studied Cognitive Science at Yale University and completed a M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology at the University of North Carolina. While a graduate student at Dartmouth, A.J. combined eyetracking, virtual reality, and large language models to study patterns of naturalistic visual attention in real-world environments. Her dissertation research sought to understand what factors guide individuals’ attention, and how this may differ in clinical conditions, such as autism. A.J. is excited to continue using research methods that offer insight into naturalistic behavior in everyday contexts, and she’s eager to jump into research with developmental populations. Ultimately, she hopes to understand the mechanisms linking visual attention and higher order cognitive processes in both typical and atypical development.
.jpg)
Jane Yang
2nd year PhD student
Jane completed her undergrad at UCSD, where she worked with Eva Wittenberg and was advised by Judy Fan and Ben Bergen for her Honors Thesis. After graduation, she spent two years at UT Austin working with Chen Yu as a lab technician in Developmental Intelligence Lab. She is broadly interested in children’s concept learning and multimodal learning. It fascinates her that a child can easily understand fundamental properties of objects from a few examples while a highly trained model fails short. She would like to leverage behavioral experiments and use computational modeling to study children’s language and visual development in real-world contexts!
​
Haoyu Du
1st year PhD student
Haoyu graduated from the University of Michigan with a combined BS/MS in Mathematics and minors in Linguistics and German. She then spent two years at MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences working with Dr. Rebecca Saxe and Dr. Frederik Kamps. She is interested in what cognitive processes, biological structures, and/or environmental features support human babies’ abilities to learn rapidly from sensory information, and how they change over time and experience.
​
Tarun Sepuri
Lab Coordinator
Tarun graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2023 where he studied Cognitive Science and Computer Science. He is interested in examining the nature of early conceptual and visual representations, and how they relate to the social contexts within which children are embedded. He would also like to leverage multimodal models to better understand these representations. Outside of the lab, he enjoys going on runs and birdwatching.
​tarunsepuri.com
.jpg)
Nicole Sahrling
Honors Thesis Research Assistant
Nicole is a 4th year developmental psychology major at UC San Diego. She is broadly interested in how children learn from their everyday environments, with a particular focus on curiosity, visual perception, and the role of naturalistic environments in shaping conceptual understanding. Outside of the lab, she enjoys dancing ballet, and reading niche books.
Juan Pablo Bello
Research Assistant
Juan Pablo is a 3rd year undergraduate at UC San Diego, majoring in Cognitive Science with a specialization in Design and Interaction. He is interested in how people learn from interacting with objects and technology, especially in virtual reality. He is also curious about how a person’s surroundings or setting can shape their behavior. In addition, Juan is interested in language acquisition and in understanding how children learn. Outside of the lab, he enjoys running in nature, trying new food, and listening to live music.
.jpg)
Rochelle Boegeman
Research Assistant
Rochelle is a 3rd year Psychology major at UC San Diego with prior experience being a preschool teacher which inspired her curiosity about how children learn and grow in everyday settings. She is particularly interested in how object exploration, visual perception, and social play contribute to cognitive and emotional development, and how the neurological structures involved in these processes evolve as infants learn. Outside the lab, Rochelle enjoys watching movies and going to the San Diego Zoo.
Noemie Cuvelette
Research Assistant
Noemie is a 4th year undergraduate student at UC San Diego and is double majoring in General Psychology and Art History & Criticism. She has an interest in combining her curiosity for developmental psychology and her passion for visual arts in her research. She is currently mostly focused on the implications of visual stimuli and what cognitive processes can tell us about children’s knowledge acquisition. Eventually, Noemie wants to utilize the processing of visual stimuli for an application in promoting growth and healing in children. Outside of the lab, she enjoys spending time dancing with her friends, going to the beach and has a long list of books to read that she will, eventually, get through.
Dora Deng
Research Assistant
Dora is a 4th year undergraduate student at UC San Diego, studying Clinical Psychology and Neurobiology. She is interested in naturalistic learning, particularly how children learn through visual perception, object interactions, and social play. She hopes to understand how learning mechanisms develop across different stages of childhood and ultimately aims to explore how these processes may differ between typical and atypical populations in the future. Outside of the lab, she enjoys cafe hopping, singing, and playing board games!
Mira Mateo
Research Assistant
Mira is a 2nd year undergraduate student at UC San Diego studying Clinical Psychology. She is also interested in social and developmental psychology, especially neurodevelopmental conditions like autism. She hopes to understand how different learning environments in early childhood shape children’s personal development and how children both with and without special needs can be best supported by equitable early childhood education and clinical therapies. Outside of the lab, she enjoys concerts, crocheting, drawing, reading, and trying new foods.
Isabel Phamvan
Research Assistant
Isabel is a 4th year undergraduate student at UCSD majoring in Psychology with a minor in Data Science. She is interested in using computational tools and machine learning to make insights in psychological research, specifically within social and development psychology. Through her studies, Isabel aims to strengthen her skills in data organization, statistical modeling, and interpretive analysis. Outside of the lab, she enjoys rock climbing, cafes, and learning to cook.
Jason Yang
Research Assistant
Jason is a 2nd year student at UC San Diego, double majoring in Cognitive Science and Philosophy. He is broadly interested in how children learn from their visual experience in naturalistic settings, specifically how they form representations, categories, and concepts that support their development of higher cognitive processes. Ultimately, he aims to explore visual-cognitive development through computational modeling and behavioral experiments, while drawing on theoretical insights from philosophy. Outside of the lab, he enjoys hiking, playing soccer, and reading.