Nicole Han

Graduate Student

Advisor

Research Area

Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience

Biography

Nicole Han grew up in Shanghai, China. She earned her B.S. in Cognitive Psychology and Economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (go Illini!). In 2017, she joined the Vision and Image Understanding Lab as a Ph.D under the supervision of Dr. Miguel Eckstein in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB.

Research

My main research interest lies in understanding the mechanisms, both shared and distinct, that humans and machines use to perform visual tasks. In my first project in the lab, I investigated the degree to which different facial features contribute to the guidance of the first (and most critical) eye movements onto faces when we do face identification tasks. Later on, I grew interests in computer vision and worked on a project to utilize different machine learning models to identify the most useful visual information in natural scenes to improve the quality of bionic vision with Dr. Michael Beyeler. Currently, I am working on multiple projects aiming to understand how humans and machines perceive other person's direction of gaze, and how others' gaze information affects where and what we attend to in real-world environments (i.e., gaze-cueing). In general, I am interested in combining measurements of human behavior (psychophysics, eye tracking), computational neuroscience, and machine learning techniques to identify and characterize the neural, cognitive, and perceptual mechanisms underlying human performance of common and critical visual tasks.

[visual perception, vision neuroscience, eye movements, attention, machine learning, computer vision, computational models]