Biography
I received my B.A. in Advertising from Wuhan University, China, and B.S. in Psychology from Central China Normal University. I earned M.S. degrees in both Psychological Science and Advertising from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and am now pursuing a doctoral degree in Psychology also in the University of Illinois. I currently work as a graduate research assistant in the Vision Lab directed by Drs. Buetti and Lleras.
Research Description
As a doctoral student, I am working with Drs. Buetti and Lleras in the Vision Lab.
My major research interest concerns how visual features combine to guide people's attention during efficient visual search. Specifically, I am studying when people visually search for the target in a scene, how does target-distractor distinctiveness along color, shape or texture feature dimensions combine to provide the overall distinctiveness signals that enable people to distinguish the target from the distractors. I am using a new prediction-based approach to study people's visual search behavior, which could serve as an alternative to the traditional null hypothesis significance testing methodology.
I am also interested in understanding other aspects of visual search. For example, how the visual search process is influenced by factors such as the number of distractors in the scene, the similarity of distractors to the target, the heterogeneity of the distractors, etc. I am also studying how people’s visual search efficiency is related to other aspect of visual ability, such as visual working memory and object recognition ability.
Finally, I am interested the influence of culture on time perception. Specifically, I am studying how culture influences people’s perceived duration of emotional events. Importantly, in this research we also manipulate individuals’ sense of control over the events they see in the experiments.