Our Team
The Spatial Cognition Lab
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
Sami Yousif
Dr. Yousif is the Principal Investigator of the Spatial Cognition Lab. He is interested in all the various things you can read about on this website, and much more! You can learn more about him via his personal webpage.
Graduate Students
Xinyi Zhao
Xinyi is an incoming PhD student who will join us this fall. She earned her M.S. in Psychology from Sun Yat-sen University, where she studied various aspects of face perception. More generally, she is primarily interested in the perception of visuospatial relations and is currently exploring broader topics in visual cognition.
Kunlin (Nickel) Jin
Nickel is an incoming PhD student who will join us this Fall. He received his M.S. in Psychological Science from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he studied how image properties and statistical regularities influence aesthetic judgments. In this next chapter of his career, he plans to study spatial cognition more broadly.
Lab manager
Ellie Wintrich
Ellie is a second-year undergraduate student at OSU studying biology. We are also lucky to have her serve as our (part-time) lab manager!
Undergraduate Students
Anthony Herzog
Anthony is a fourth-year undergraduate student at OSU studying psychology. He is interested in spatial memory and how it is affected by structural changes to the environment.
Mahwish Kittur
Mahwish is a second-year undergraduate student at UNC studying neuroscience. She is working to understand topological representation through drawing.
Charles Demczuk
Charles is a third-year undergraduate student at OSU studying Psychology and Neuroscience. He is interested in visual perception, with a current focus on serial dependence.
Chance McKinnie
Chance is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UNC studying Psychology, Spanish, and Anthropology.
Rachel Olugbusi
Rachel is a third-year undergraduate student at UNC studying neuroscience and computer science. She is working on adaptation of visual ensembles.
Naomi Lytle
Naomi is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UNC studying Psychology, Linguistics, and Data Science. She is interested in variability in cross-modal perception.
Ashna Shah
Ashna is a third-year undergraduate student at UNC studying neuroscience and computer science. She is interested in topological structure and the perception of complexity.
Kyra Warmuth
Kyra is a second-year undergraduate student at OSU studying psychology and classical humanities. She is interested in how the structure of spatial environments influences memory.
Gabe Waterhouse
Gabe is a second-year undergraduate student at UNC studying psychology. He is interested in the perception of number and related dimensions.
Agnes Zhang
Agnes is a third-year undergraduate student at OSU studying psychology. She is interested in many, many things — but in our lab, she has studied topological representation, via drawing.
Friends of the lab
Brynn Sherman
Brynn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Ohio State and the Principal Investigator of the Moments Lab, with whom we share a lab space. We work together on questions related to event and time perception.
Sam Clarke
Sam is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He's also cross-appointed in Psychology and primarily works on issues at the intersection between philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He's particularly interested in non-linguistic cognition – i.e., psychological processes that emerge independently of natural language and cognitive processes that don’t involve linguistically structured representations. With us, he collaborates on projects related to adaptation.
Tal Boger
Tal is a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins working with Chaz Firestone. Broadly, he studies visual perception and cognition, with a focus on how the mind separates ‘content’ from ‘form’. In our lab, he studies the cognitive mechanisms supporting (strategic) random behavior.
Rodrigo Garro-Rivero
Rodrigo is a third-year PhD student in philosophy at USC. He received his MA in philosophy from Virginia Tech and his BA in philosophy from PUCP in Peru. His research sits at the intersection of the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, engaging with topics in contemporary psychology. In particular, he is especially interested in how we represent visuospatial relations, the nature of representational vehicles, and whether mental representations are best understood as analog or digital.
Dorsa Amir
Dorsa is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University and the director of the Mind & Culture Lab. Together, we’ve been interested in understanding humans’ capacity for random behavior.
Jie (Skye) Zheng
Skye is the lab manager of the Moments Lab. Skye received a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in Social Sciences (Psychology concentration) from the University of Chicago. Before joining the lab, she worked with Dr. Molly Erickson on projects investigating EEG markers of cognitive control. She works closely with our lab in a variety of ways and is currently working on projects related to memorability and the perception of time.