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

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 these domains to better evaluate how multimodal models learn. Outside of the lab, he enjoys going on runs and birdwatching.​