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HOMENEWSPEOPLERESEARCHPUBLICATIONSPERSONAL

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WE ARE INTERESTED IN THE WAYS THAT PERCEPTION -- WHAT WE SEE -- CAN INTERACT
WITH BROADER MENTAL LIFE.

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WHAT'S NEW

   
 * Grid. Check out this short film of our work on scaffolded attention, now also
   streaming on labocine (you might need to sign-up for the newsletter, which I
   encourage anyway, since there's a lot of other cool content at the
   intersection of science and cinema). (January 2024)
   
   
 * Building connections in Europe. Joan gave a talk at the European Conference
   on Visual Perception --- on the role of eye movements in everyday
   hallucinations via scaffolded attention. (August 2023)
   
   
 * The lab at VSS 2023. Joan will be giving her last talk as a member of the
   Yale Perception & Cognition Lab --- on the perception of unfinishedness.
   While all previous work has explored this phenomenon in the context of
   higher-level cognition, the current study demonstrates how this property of
   dynamic unfolding events may actually be spontaneously extracted in visual
   processing. (May 2023)
   
   
 * We're looking for students. We will be accepting applications for graduate
   students this coming fall, to start in fall 2024, so stay tuned for UBC
   guidelines on how to submit your application. If you are interested in
   joining us, drop Joan a note. Or if you are reading this and know someone
   else who might be a good fit, please send them along our way! (May 2023)
   
   
 * And we are live! We are so excited to be launching the lab's official site.
   Keep up to date with the latest in the lab through our webpage. (May 2023)
   
   

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WHO WE ARE

Joan Danielle Ongchoco
Lab Director
While the raw material of perception may be a continuous wash of light and
sound, Joan is interested in how so much of mental life may be inescapably
discrete. She received her PhD from Yale University, where she worked with Brian
Scholl. (Her dissertation committee also included Marvin Chun, Julian
Jara-Ettinger, Phil Corlett, and L.A. Paul.) Before Yale, she was part of the
inaugural class of Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where she studied Philosophy,
Politics, and Economics. Joan dances.

We've been slowly growing the lab, so stay tuned!


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RESEARCH AT A GLANCE

The raw material of perception is intrinsically continuous — undifferentiated
washes of light, sound, space, and time. In stark contrast, what we consciously
experience are discrete individuals — objects and events.


HOW TO CREATE OBJECTS WITH YOUR MIND

A curious thing can happen when you stare at a regular gridlike pattern as in
bathroom tiles or a piece of graph paper. What do you see? At a first pass, of
course, you see the individual squares, but many people find that they can also
‘see’ more complex shapes and patterns beyond the squares themselves. We call
this phenomenon ‘scaffolded attention’, inspired by how the grid of squares
serves as the scaffold or raw material for our ‘imagination’. Across space and
time, vision and audition, I am currently exploring the nature, scope, and
prevalence of this phenomenon.

Click here to give it a try!




HOW OUR PERCEPTION OF EVENTS CONNECTS WITH THE REST OF MENTAL LIFE

Our perceptual experiences are inherently dynamic — we experience discrete
events. On the one hand, we explore the breadth of influence of event perception
on our mental lives — including the surprising ways our perception of events
might interact with other mental processes, from enumeration, time perception,
causal perception, decision-making, and mental dysfunction (such as paranoia and
rumination). On the other, we go in-depth into "how it works". In particular,
when the statistics of our local environment dramatically change (as when we
move from one event to the next), it may be adaptive to flush our mental buffer
of obsolete information to some degree (as one might clear a buffer in a
computer program). In this line of work, we explore how beginnings, endings, and
the hierarchy of experience interact with memory flushing in more nuanced ways
than previously thought.

See list of publications, manuscripts, and presentations.

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JOINING OUR TEAM


GRADUATE STUDENTS AND POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

If you are interested in joining our lab as a graduate student or postdoctoral
fellow, do drop Joan a note! We're always eager to have a conversation about the
potential synergy between your interests and the lab's, and we can discuss the
possibilities of your joining the team from there.


RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

If you are looking to get research experience and are interested in sorts of
questions we ask in the lab (especially in the nature of visual perception and
how it connects with broader mental life), you are also more than welcome to
reach out. Generally, having some background or familiarity in cognitive science
and/or research methods in psychology will help a lot, but we would also be
happy to have you if you are coming from a completely different discipline (say,
philosophy, or the arts) but want to explore questions about the mind.

In our lab, an RA usually will work closely with Joan and/or the graduate
students in the lab to explore different questions involving how the mind works.
This can include helping out with data collection and participating in lab
meetings. But you will also be strongly encouraged to develop your own project
from start to finish -- from designing your own experiments, analyzing the data,
presenting your work in conferences, to eventually writing this work up for
publication. The idea is for you to be able to pursue the questions that capture
your imagination, rather than just doing work to answer someone else's
questions. Usually, RAs might start out on a volunteer basis to 'test the
waters', and then we can discuss eventually getting course credit or pay.

If this sounds right for you, you can email Joan the following: (1) your name
and major; (2) why you are interested in getting research experience; and (3)
any prior research experience and relevant skills (e.g., programming, data
analysis) that you might have. We also encourage you to check out recent papers
from the lab, and see if any of those inspire new research questions/ideas for
you.