Contact Information
elias.cohen@vancouver.wsu.edu
Research Interests: How do we gather and interpret information from our environment?
My research is centered around understanding how the brain makes use of visual information gathered by the eyes. While the experience of looking for, recognizing, and physically manipulating one's favorite coffee mug is both effortless and automatic, each step involves great computational virtuosity by the most versatile problem solver known, the human brain! Retinal images of even a single object can be infinitely diverse (due to differences such as produced by lighting, distance from the object, and viewpoint). In my work I seek to uncover the brain's method of encoding objects to deal with such diversity.
Specific research foci include:
- 2D shape decomposition into simple parts
- 3D shape from texture
- Symmetry
- Shape from motion/Motion from shape
- Attention/Eye movements
- Encoding of mid-level shape properties
Methods include:
- Behavioral psychophysics
- Computational modeling
- fMRI
Quick Bio
I received my PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University where I worked with Manish Singh. Next, I worked as a post-doc in Vision Science for two years with Qasim Zaidi at the SUNY College of Optometry. I am now working as post-doc in Cognitive Neuroscience in Frank Tong's lab at Vanderbilt University.
