Brian Scholl  
 
 
Hello. I'm a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Chair of the Cognitive Science Program, and director of the Perception and Cognition Laboratory, at Yale University. Our lab explores how we see and how we think, with a special focus on how perception interacts with (and provides a foundation for) other aspects of our mental lives. Some of our current burning questions include:
  • How is our conscious visual awareness constructed?
  • How does seeing relate to (and provide a foundation for) thinking?
  • How does the visual system represent objects and events?
  • How, when, and why do we perceive causality, agency, physics, and time?
  • How do perception, memory, and learning interact to produce experience?
  • How can we communicate information by exploiting the nature of perception?
For more information about this research (including papers, manuscripts, demos, et al.), please visit the links listed in the banner above.

You may also want to visit our main lab webpage (with a list of lab members, a photo gallery, etc.), and note that RA positions are available for Yale undergraduates.


Background
I joined the faculty at Yale as an Assistant Professor in 2001 (and then was an Associate Professor on Term from 2005-2006, and an Associate Professor without Term from 2006-2010). Before coming to Yale I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, working primarily with Ken Nakayama. I received my PhD from Rutgers University, where I worked with Zenon Pylyshyn, who was the director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. (My dissertation committee also included Jacob Feldman, Jerry Fodor, Alan Leslie, and Anne Triesman.) Earlier, I was an undergraduate at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota ("town of cows, colleges, and contentment"), where I studied computer science and also psychology. I grew up in what used to be a rural part of Wisconsin.

Deeper Background
Working back through my academic lineage uncovered some interesting facts -- e.g. that my academic great-great-great-great grandfather was the first student ever awarded a PhD in Psychology from Yale, in 1895; and that my academic great-great-great-great-great grandfather established the original Yale Psychological Laboratory.

Biographical Blurbs
The journal American Psychologist published this short professional biography in 2006. Or, you can read a shorter, more formal, and more recent biographical blurb.

CV, Bibliometrics
You can download or view a copy of my CV, or see a list of my papers on Google Scholar.


Contact Information
Please feel free to contact me with any questions about our research:

Brian Scholl
Email : brian.scholl@yale.edu
Professor
Office : 100 College Street, #1223
Department of Psychology
FedEx : Yale Psychology; 200 S. Frontage Rd
Yale University
Box 208047
Phone : 203-432-4629
New Haven, CT 06520-8047
Fax : 203-432-7172
 

Some of the material on this website is based on work supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, and the Templeton Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of these agencies.