Research | Qianying Wu

I study the social dimensions of cognition — how attention, perception, learning, and decision-making are shaped by social context.

This includes processing socially meaningful stimuli, learning about or from others, and making decisions during interpersonal interactions.

Many of these processes are altered in psychiatric conditions. My research aims to develop novel tasks and computational models to better understand and characterize social functioning challenges in clinical populations.

Social Attention

I study social attention using eye-tracking (ET) across screen-based, webcam-based, and smartphone platforms. I apply feature-based visual saliency models to capture individual differences in attention allocation during naturalistic video viewing.

Webcam-based Eye-tracking in Autism Over the Internet

I recorded gaze data from ~ 600 autistic adults over the internet while they watched several feature-engineered social conversation videos.

Mar 1, 2025

Smartphone Eye-tracking

Partner with Google, we explored the possibility of in-home autism research.

Mar 1, 2025

Social Learning

Another key focus of my research is social learning, particularly observational learning. I investigate the underlying neuro-computations of different learning strategies using computational modeling and neuroimaging.

Emulation and Imitation during Observational Learning

With 2 large online datasets, I found that individuals with higher autistic traits are less likely to infer the others' goals.

Mar 1, 2025

Neuro-computations of Observational Learning vs. Experiential Learning

How does the brain decide when to rely on others vs. past experience when making decisions?

Mar 1, 2025