After years of analyzing thousands of drawings from hundreds of adults and children, I am excited to share my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social )! Using a simple drawing task, we show how topological structure is represented in the mind and its importance in spatial memory.

Now out in JEP:G (w/ samiyousif.bsky.social)! Here, we explore what quantities (e.g., number, area, size) are perceived most automatically (and spoiler: it’s more complicated than we thought!).

psycnet.apa.org/record/2028-...

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates?

In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes!

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

When you look at a complex scene, you perceive various ensembles — sets of items of various sizes, numbers, etc. Are some more salient than others? In a new paper (w/ samiyousif.bsky.social), we provide an answer to this question! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Sadly I will not be at VSS this year, but here's what our lab is up to!

(In solidarity with many VSS attendees, however, I may be foregoing many hours of sleep -- not for long walks on the beach but due to the anticipated arrival of a second child any day now...)

Recently, (recommended) prices at @joinprolific.bsky.social have doubled. Simultaneously, data quality and collection speed seem to have gone down noticeably (especially speed). Are others having this experience?

These changes make the platform significantly less viable for our lab.

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you.

www.cogdevlab.org

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system.

In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am excited to announce my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social ) about a new illusion of *number*: the “Crowd Size Illusion”. osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am very excited to be presenting my work with @samiyousif.bsky.social at #VSS2025 tomorrow! I will be talking about a new illusion of number perception that we call the “Crowd Size Illusion”!