Lab Members & Collaborators

Principal Investigator

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  Benjamin van Buren

  Assistant Professor of Psychology
  vanburenb@newschool.edu; CV

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  Ben conducts research on social perception, focusing on our intriguing tendency to automatically see others' movements as caused by their underlying intentions. Ben's broader research interests include the relationship between perception and higher-level thought, and applications of vision science 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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  Sara Obaid Ul Islam

  MA Student
  obais348@newschool.edu

  Sara is interested in how our prior experience with visual environments (e.g. natural scenes, websites) changes the way in which we attend to and extract information from them. In the lab, Sara studied how people deploy attention when viewing social media, which have overnight become a fixture in homo sapiens’ visual ecology. Sara hails from Pakistan, and has received a Fulbright Scholarship to support studying at the New School.

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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.