The lab at the Beckman Institute, Fall 2024
Who are we?
Director, Cognition & Social Perception Lab
Stefan is a newly appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at UIUC and explores topics at the intersection of social and visual cognition using simple behavioral methods in conjunction with cutting edge generative AI techniques. He is affiliated with IMMERSE (Center for Immersive Computing) and also holds an appointment with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology. Hewill be a part-time Associate Editor for JEP:General starting in 2025. Stefan was trained at Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He loves programming, singing, kayaking, and video games. You can learn more about him at his (less regularly updated!) personal website here.
Graduate Student
Harini is a doctoral student here in the Attention & Perception program. She holds an M.S. in Psychology from Villanova University, as well as a B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience and an M.Res. from the University of Nottingham, Malaysia. Her research interests include exploring how context influences visual (and speech) perception, computational modelling, and more recently, understanding how ambient or environmental factors such as lighting can influence social judgments of people. In her free time, you can find her cooking and creating yummy treats for the lab, making art, or playing Stardew Valley.
Graduate Student
Siddharth is interested in how perception and cognition interact. He is currently working on building generative models of various stimulus categories, such as objects, scenes, and faces to study how we see and judge them. Siddharth is a tech enthusiast and keenly follows trends related to Web 3.0 and 3D interactivity (e.g., AR, VR). When he's not at work, he enjoys jogging (preferably along a beach of some kind), meditating, composing music, playing the guitar, and reading. Siddharth originally hails from Visakhapatnam, India.
Master's Student
Chunliang is a first-year student in the Master of Science in Psychological Science (MSPS) program here at UIUC. His research currently focuses on the case of ensemble perception, or how we perceive crowds of faces. It turns out that we can quickly and accurately detect the average properties of a crowd (e.g. age, emotion). His work tries to uncover the mechanism behind this fascinating ability of the visual system.