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.

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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. 

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brialong.com | curriculum vitae

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.

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! 

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curriculum vitae

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.

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haoyudu.github.io

Tarun graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2023 where he studied Cognitive Science and Computer Science. There, he researched the effect of artificial intelligence on skill acquisition and the linguistic input patterns of children's digital media. He is interested in language development and how that is informed by semantic representations and learning in general. He would also like to use multimodal models to better understand these representations. Outside of the lab, he enjoys going on runs and birdwatching.

​tarunsepuri.com

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.

Pamela is a 3rd year undergraduate student at UCSD studying cognitive science with a specialization in machine learning. She is interested in how intelligent systems can be designed to better align with human behavior and cognition. Outside of the lab, she enjoys golfing, wildlife/landscape photography, and exploring new sights with friends.

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!

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.