Hello! I am a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. I research the perceptual processes that carve up the world for higher-level cognition. Specifically, I study the perception of animacy .

Even simple geometric shapes seem alive when they move in certain ways (e.g., by chasing one another). It appears that the mind quickly and automatically uses simple motion and orientation cues to impute animacy to objects. And like other perceptual processes, this doesn't involve much thinking or reasoning!

Recently my research has focused on context and consequences. How does visual context (e.g., being attached to another shape, or being presented on top of a moving background) influence the detection of animate motion? How does our behavior change around animates, and how does animate motion change how we encode information about objects? I conduct this research primarily with Brian Scholl, who directs the Yale Perception and Cognition Laboratory.