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Chunliang (Cyrus) Yang

Biography

I am first-year student in the Master of Science in Psychological program at the University of Illinois at   Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Before joining UIUC, I received my dual degree in Cognitive Science and   Computer Science from Lehigh University in 2024. At Lehigh, I worked with Dr. Nancy Carlisle to study negative attentional templates and visual search. At Illinois, I work with Dr. Stefan Uddenberg to investigate default assumptions embedded in the visual system and to develop relevant software tools along the way. 

Research Interests

  • Face Perception
  • Ensemble Perception
  • Efficient coding

Research Description

In Cognition and Social Perception Lab (CASPER), we study how we see and remember the world around us, with a special focus on faces. My research is currently focused on the case of ensemble perception, or how we see crowds of faces. It turns out we can quickly and accurately detect the average properties of a crowd (e.g. age, emotion). My work tries to uncover the mechanism behind this fascinating ability of the visual system.