About

I am a postdoc at the Center for Mind & Brain located in the University of California Davis campus. I am part of the Visual Cognition Lab directed by Dr. John Henderson. My current work explores and characterizes the mutual relationship between semantics of real world scenes and our eye movements. I use eye tracking, computational modelling and behavioral analysis to address these issues. I am interested in a variety of topics at the intersection of vision, language and thought.

My research seeks to understand how visual processing unfolds over time. A great deal of vision research deals with punctate events, short bursts of cognitive effort, and recognition problems with a single end point as the desired solution. But much of what the visual system allows us to do involves sustained mental effort, goals that develop over time, and a sense of narrative that can be related to linguistic representations. I am interested in characterizing how visual processing unfolds over multiple time scales, and how it supplies us with information beyond object and feature recognition.

During my PhD (advised by Dr. Jonathan Flombaum), I have pursued a variety of projects that were looking at visual processing at different time scales and in various contexts. A number of themes arise throughout these projects, including the consequences and management of our foveated visual system, the perception of duration itself, and the role of memory in temporally unfolding cognition. Commensurate with the scope of these projects I have used a range of methods including psychophysics, computational modelling, eye tracking, and psycholinguistics.

I am very interested in building computational models to study how human cognition works. I try to keep up with the research in Machine Learning / Deep Learning community to this end. Some of the issues that I deeply care about are the symbolic vs. distributed representations, and their role in cognition.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions regarding my research. I am currently located at

Center for Mind & Brain - 171, 267 Cousteau Pl, Davis - CA, 95618

or email me at aditya.usa8@gmail.com

Education:

• Johns Hopkins University (2016 - 2021)
  Ph.D in Cognitive Psychology
• Johns Hopkins University (2016 - 2018)
  M.A. Cognitive Psychology
• North Carolina State University (2015 - 2016)
  M.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering
• BITS-Pilani, India (2008 - 2013)
  M.Sc. Physics
• BITS-Pilani, India (2008 - 2013)
  Bachelors, Electronics & Communications Engineering