Within moments of watching a scene unfold, humans know far more than what is simply in front of them. We recognize what people are doing, anticipate how they'll interact with objects, and perceive physical properties like mass, speed, and force — using all of this to guide our own actions almost instantly. How does the mind extract this rich understanding from visual and sensorimotor experience? The goal of my research is to understand how everyday experience shapes perception, action understanding, and intuitive physical reasoning.

A central focus of my lab is making experience itself measurable. Rather than treating past experience as an abstract explanation for perception or cognition, we use large-scale naturalistic egocentric video to characterize the actions, object interactions, and physical and social regularities people encounter as they look, move, and act in the world. We then ask how this structure gives rise to expectations about what people are doing, what will happen next, and how objects and people will behave.

To achieve these goals, my lab combines psychophysics and behavioral experiments with computational modeling, computer vision, and large-scale analysis of naturalistic video. This approach lets us connect the statistical structure of everyday experience to the computations that support visual perception, action understanding, and physical cognition.

Before joining  Mississippi State University, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University working with Leyla Isik and Jason Fischer. I completed my PhD at Brown University, where I was advised by Fulvio Domini