Jane Yang 杨怿恬

I’m a Ph.D. student in Experimental Psychology at UC San Diego in the Visual Learning Lab, advised by Bria Long. I received my B.S. in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, where I specialized in Machine Learning & Neural Computation and minored in Computer Science.

I study how children and adults perceive and interact with objects in the real world, how early experience builds object representations, and how that can evaluate and inform vision models. Looking, holding, and moving objects changes the views people get, and those everyday views differ from the curated images models are trained on. I combine developmental and adult behavioral experiments with large-scale egocentric video from the child’s perspective (e.g., the BabyView dataset): detection and embedding pipelines, human–model benchmarks for object and 3D perception, and analyses of how naturalistic visual input is structured. I’m interested in embodied perception and action across development, model evaluation, and how the structure of training data shapes what models learn.

beyond research

Outside of research, I enjoy weightlifting, gardening, cooking, and forays and tidepooling. I have two bunnies. Mochi is a cowboy from Austin, Texas, and was part of a farm rescue. Cyndi Lopear is a San Diego native diva: she was found as a stray and later taken to the shelter.

A few photos