Михаела Бочева
Hi — my name is Michaela, and I'm currently a PhD student in cognitive science at Yale.
Here are three foundational phenomena in visual cognition that at first blush might seem unrelated: (1) You are better able to discriminate two probe features when they lie on the same object, vs. different objects — even controlling for spatial proximity.
(2) You may spontaneously see robust biological motion in ‘point-light’ displays, but such percepts disappear when those same points are spatially scrambled.
(3) You may spontaneously perceive one object chasing another, even when both are simple geometric shapes — but only if the motion of a ‘wolf’ is conditional on the motion of a ‘sheep’ in very particular ways.
Despite the variance in these phenomena, they all share the property of structure.
Structure is a first-class citizen of the mind. In vision, it is largely explained through Gestalt-like principles or information-theoretic complexity. In social inference, it exists in the perceived shapes and regularities of interactions between agents. In language, it is defined by the rules, constraints, and hierarchies of linguistic communication.
I'm interested in the nature of structure in the mind. How is it represented? In what format is it stored? Over what units is it computed?
My long-term research program aims to explore structure representations as a domain-general phenomenon.
Check out our lab's website at https://perception.yale.edu/