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Introduction
Education
August 2011 - June 2016
August 2006 - May 2010
Publications
Publications (32)
Emerging research suggests that visual perspective taking might be based in part on a default, early developing cognitive process. This hypothesis receives support from experiments demonstrating that adults experience interference from task-irrelevant perspectives of depicted agents even when participants are making judgments about their own perspe...
In a wide range of circumstances, it is important to perceive and represent the sequence of events. For example, sequence perception is necessary to learn statistical contingencies between events, and to generate predictions about events when segmenting actions. However, viewer's awareness of event sequence is rarely tested, and at least some means...
We present evidence demonstrating that the structure of everyday events guides attention to and representation of visual properties. Incidental change detection increases dramatically at the boundaries between events, whereas individuals are largely unaware of the sequence of actions within a single event. Observers demonstrate a limited capacity f...
As a wide variety of intelligent technologies become part of everyday life, researchers have explored how people conceptualize agents that in some ways act and think like living things but are clearly machines. Much of this work draws upon the idea that people readily default to generalizing human-like properties to such agents, and only pare back...
Commentators interested in the societal implications of automated decision-making often overlook how decisions are made in the technology’s absence. For example, the benefits of ML and big data are often summarized as efficiency, objectivity, and consistency; the risks, meanwhile, include replicating historical discrimination and oversimplifying nu...
Although several research programs have explored how people track changes in objects over time, it is not clear how consistently people are aware of the precise state of dynamic scenes. The importance of object tracking is put to a particularly interesting test in cinema, where editors must combine different views of dynamically changing objects (s...
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested the hypothesis that cinematic structure shapes variation in social-cognitive brain activity. Using our film, we completed an exploratory analysis of how activations in the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) are shaped by variations in insert shots (e.g., shots...
Believable characters are core elements of a coherent story. Qualities that make story characters more believable include goals, beliefs, personality, and emotion. We propose computational models of emotion and personality by adapting the OCC model of emotion and the Five Factor personality model. Our models are formulated into multi-agent strong-s...
Indexter is a plan-based computational model of narrative discourse which leverages cognitive scientific theories of how events are stored in memory during online comprehension. These discourse models are valuable for static and interactive narrative generation systems because they allow the author to reason about the audience's understanding and a...
The Approximate Number Sense (ANS) is a psychophysical construct thought to underlie quantity estimation, number processing, and the acquisition of number and math concepts during childhood. ANS acuity can be measured through speeded judgments of relative magnitude of symbolic (numerals) or non-symbolic (multiple objects) methods. However, the rela...
The Approximate Number Sense (ANS) is a psychophysical construct thought to underlie quantity estimation, number processing, and the acquisition of number and math concepts during childhood. ANS acuity can be measured through speeded quantitative comparison items, which can be metricized through an “internal Weber fraction”, w, of an individual’s s...
Imagine you see a video of someone pulling back their leg to kick a soccer ball, and then a soccer ball soaring toward a goal. You would likely infer that these scenes are two parts of the same event, and this inference would likely cause you to remember having seen the moment the person kicked the soccer ball, even if that information was never ac...
The salience of a narrative event is defined as the ease with which an audience member can recall that past event. This article describes a series of experiments investigating the use of salience as a predictor of player behavior in interactive narrative scenarios. We utilize Indexter, a plan-based model of narrative for reasoning about salience. I...
Researchers have been interested in the perception of human emotional expressions for decades. Importantly, most empirical work in this domain has relied on controlled stimulus sets of adults posing for various emotional expressions. Recently, the Child Affective Facial Expression (CAFE) set was introduced to the scientific community, featuring a l...
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the relationship between film and cognitive science. This is reflected in a new science of cinema that can help us both to understand this art form, and to produce new insights about cognition and perception. In this review, we begin by describing how the initial development of cinema involved close o...
Several studies have explored the determinants of anthropomorphism: the tendency to endow nonhuman agents with human features, goals, and intentions. Less is known of the cognitive benefits that may arise from anthropomorphism. Following research in narrative comprehension, we explored how the attribution of human-like features and intentional goal...
Levin and Banaji (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 501-512, 2006) reported a lightness illusion in which participants appeared to perceive Black faces to be darker than White faces, even though the faces were matched for overall brightness and contrast. Recently, this finding was challenged by Firestone and Scholl (Psychonomic Bull...
We argue that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) provide worthwhile recommendations but that their critique of research by Levin and Banaji (2006) is unfounded. In addition, we argue that F&S apply unjustified level of skepticism about top-down effects relative to other broad hypotheses about the sources of perceptual intelligence.
Indexter is a plan-based computational model of narrative discourse which leverages cognitive scientific theories of how events are stored in memory during on-line comprehension. These discourse models are valuable for static and interactive narrative generation systems because they allow the author to reason about the audience's understanding and...
Developmental research has demonstrated infants' ability to monitor goals and intentions as early as 8 months old, yet research consistently reveals that adult perspective taking is cognitively effortful and error prone. Several recent studies have tested a two-system theory, whereby a relatively quick, heuristic process tracks the basic visuospati...
This study tests how inconsistencies in spatial relationships affect visual property representations. We do this by violating a filmmaking heuristic known as the 180° rule, a convention of placing cameras in a consistent and limited area of the set. Violating this rule produces the percept of a sudden spatial dislocation or inconsistency. According...
Researchers have examined the role of gesture in signal presentation, but few have investigated how gestures differ in their communicative capacity. In this study, we investigated the relative comprehension of metamorphic, deictic, beat, and iconic gestures (McNeill, 1985). A sample of natural communicative gestures was acquired from social observa...