I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Steve Heinen's lab at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. I got my PhD in psychology from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. I was a member of the the Visual Thinking Lab under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Flombaum.
I grew up in Beijing, China and went to undergraduate at Peking University. There, I became very interested in psychology in the Introduction to Psychology class when I was a freshman. At the same time, I figured out that Chemistry does not work for me in the Introduction to Chemistry class. Later, I was further attracted by many fascinating vision studies. Starting from there, psychology and vision research became an important part of my life.
Vision is an amazing ability that human have. Most of us would rely on vision to explore the world. However, at the same time, there seems to be many apparent limits in our visual ability. For example, we can only process a certain amount of visual information at the same time, and we are often trapped by some specially designed displays (for some amazing visual illusions, see through the website of the 'Best Illusion of the Year Contest'). Why is this?
I try to answer this question by studying multiple functions of human visual system, including attentional tracking ability , motion perception and eye movements. I also take approaches including psychophysics experiments, computational modeling, as well as neuropsychological testing of brain damaged patients. I am also very interested in how the recent development in machine intelligence may further our understanding of human visual cognition, and vice versa. I hope that a combination of different methodologies and a focus on multiple levels of cognition could give us a more comprehensive understanding of human mind.