Lab Members & Collaborators

Principal Investigator

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  Benjamin van Buren

  Assistant Professor of Psychology
  vanburenb@newschool.edu; CV

  
  Ben conducts research on social perception, especially on our intriguing tendency to automatically see others' body movements in terms of their underlying 'intentions'. Ben's broader research interests include the relationship between perception and higher-level thought, the contributions of specific visual processes to experiences of artworks and aesthetic stimuli, and theoretically based, empirically rigorous approaches to interaction design. Before joining The New School, Ben worked with Johan Wagemans at KU Leuven, and with Brian Scholl at Yale.

Grad Student Lab Members

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  Didi Dunin (email)

  PhD Student

  Didi conducts research at the intersection of vision science and social psychology, most recently focusing on how we perceive others' ages from their faces. Before joining the lab, Didi completed a masters degree at NYU, where she investigated a matter of life and death — specifically, how anthropomorphizing objects may help to alleviate anxiety about one's mortality.

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  Loren Matelsky (email)

  PhD Student

  Loren’s research investigates how biases in visual attention may underlie higher-level social cognitive biases. She has demonstrated that when we are playing competitive games, a seemingly innocuous bias to selectively attend to information which is relevant to our own goals makes us very likely to notice visual events which impede those goals — and much less likely to notice visually matched events which impede others.

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  Hong Nguyen (email)

  PhD Student
  

  Hong is studying several ways in which we see the seemingly unseeable — as when an object’s movements look like they are caused by gravity, or an agent’s movements appear to be caused by an internal motive force or directed toward a goal. In a separate line of research on visual contributions to aesthetic judgments, Hong has shown that differences in how people dynamically visually attend contributes a great deal to how much we (dis)agree when viewing a scene.

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  Marina Pace (email)

  MA Student
  

  Marina studies how the perception of social, physical, and structural relationships arise from more basic processes of perceptual organization. Marina is inspired by Gestalt theory, as well as by contemporary models of mid- and high-level vision. Her recent projects have investigated what causes us to see visual structures as balanced, as under tension, or as about to move. She has even used some of these discoveries to design and validate more effective signage for public spaces.

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  Jiangxue Ning (email)

  PhD Student
  

  Jiangxue investigates how we automatically represent shapes in terms of intrinsic structural relations — as when we represent different parts of a shape as its top, bottom, or its front and back. Jiangxue has shown that surrounding spatial context strongly influences the perception of shape, with far-reaching consequences for social perception, motor control, and even aesthetic judgments.

Friends of the Lab

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  Silas Choudhury

  MA Student
  chous977@newschool.edu

  Silas is a Psychology and Fashion student who is studying how visual perception becomes tuned to extract features of cultural expertise — as when (some of us) learn to discriminate between fashion that is 'in' and fashion that is 'out' of style. As a case study in fashion perception, Silas is running an experiment on the categorical perception of glasses styles. They are interested in whether glasses are perceived more categorically when viewed in the context of a human face.

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  Hannes Bend

  Founder, breathing.ai
  hannes@breathing.ai

  Hannes and the breathing.ai team are collaborating with the lab to study how digital interfaces can be customized to improve people's cognitive performance (focusing on attention and distraction) and wellbeing (focusing on cardiovascular function). Prior to founding breathing.ai, Hannes completed a residency at U. of Oregon's Institute of Neuroscience, where he worked with Drs. Michael Posner and Ed Vogel to study how meditation practice mediates the impact of visual stimuli on breathing.

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  Mariah Woodruff

  MA Student
  woodm437@newschool.edu

  Mariah is currently a researcher at IBM. Prior to entering the Psychology program, she completed a Master’s degree at Parson’s School of Design. In addition to conducting research on shape perception in lab, together with Michael Schober and Aaron Hill, she also studied how to design hurricane maps for non-experts, in order to optimally visualize uncertainty and improve risk evaluation.

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  Kexuan Zhang

  BFA Student
  zhank741@newschool.edu

  Kexuan is a graphic and experience designer at Parsons, whose work in the lab explores the perception of pictorial artworks. Through her research, she hopes to learn about how observers perceive depictions of other spaces, and to deploy her discoveries in new design and UX research applications.