I am a graduate student at the Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I am particularly interested in how the mind works and why it works the way it does. Two interrelated research lines I am doing are as follows:
1) Feature coding and integration: How does the visual system process different features (e.g. color, orientation, gender, and emotion) and integrate them into coherent precepts (e.g. a red car and a smiling face)? What is the role of top-down factors such as attention and conscious awareness in enabling our efficient coding and integration?
2) Mechanisms of attentional selection: How does the visual system handle information overload? What mechanisms control our selective attention? How to integrate top-down framework, such as capacity and resource approaches, with bottom-up framework, such as saliency approaches?
Although a lot of phenomena are
studied separately, to gain a better understanding of the mind and the brain,
my research aims to blur the borders between vision, cognition, and
emotion. Towards this, I emphasize both theoretical formalization and
experimental observations.