The New Frontiers Initiative, in collaboration with the Blue Waters Project, recently selected their 2021 New Frontiers Graduate Fellows.
Fellows receive a stipend, tuition allowance, travel funds, and the use of the powerful Blue Waters computing system to advance their Ph.D. research.
Rachel's project, entitled "A Computational Account of Human Visual Reasoning, " will use new computational methods to provide greater insights about psychological theories of vision.
Nearly half of the human brain is devoted to vision, and yet there is still much we don't understand about how half works: how does the human visual system deliver representations that allow us to understand and reason about the visual world?
Rachel's computational models simulate the way we generate mental representations of the object we see, and how we compare those representations to our prior knowledge in order to make inferences about them.