I am currently working as a postdoc with Azzurra Ruggeri. I did my PhD with Todd Gureckis and Brenden Lake.
I am studying how people and machines ask questions. Asking questions is one of the human mind’s greatest tools to learn about the world. I am fascinated by the comparison of human learning (cognitive science) and machine learning (artificial intelligence), and how insights in one domain can inform the other.
From this perspective, I have also worked on other research projects, for example investigating how people infer an underlying causal structure based on a few observations.
online conference poster for CogSci2020
Learning sequential patterns from graphical programs
A fundamental question in cognitive science is how people infer structured, rule-like mental representations (Fodor, 1975).
We are addressing this question by introducing an experimental paradigm called “Track-A-Mole”, in which participants predict the step-wise movements of a cartoon mole on a two-dimensional space.
The movements of the mole are generated by underlying graphical programs.
Figure 1: (PDF version) Graphical programs for sequential patterns The programs are built from a few meaningful building blocks, such as jump, which moves the mole along its current direction and turn, which changes its current direction.
