About Me

I am a researcher at MIT (CoCoSci) studying how people perceive, learn, and reason effectively given limited cognitive resources. I did my graduate work with Steve Piantadosi at UC Berkeley. My thesis work was aimed at understanding the mechanisms underlying visual numerosity perception. I've used behavioral experiments and computational models to link the visual information people gather from a scene to their ultimate perceptions of quantities. In one project, I showed that the psychophysics of number, including "subitizing" small quantities and Weber's law for larger quantities, reflects optimal inference under a limited informational capacity. See an explainer here. You can read a précis of my thesis here.

My recent projects explore how people learn geometric patterns, reason about physical systems, and actively seek information in ways that respect their cognitive limitations. One direction I am particularly excited about is modeling and experimentally testing how people reason in complex settings without holding many pieces of information in memory simultaneously.