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The UCSD Vision and Memory lab is directed by Dr. Timothy Brady. We're based in the department of Psychology at UC San Diego. Our research lies at the intersection of visual cognition and memory, and we use a combination of behavioral, cognitive neuroscience and computational methods.


You might be interested in the lab's Publications; or our list of Research Projects, to see more detailed descriptions of the lab's research; or you might just want to download some of our Matlab code, image sets or other assorted Resources. You can also Contact us or view Dr. Brady's publications and citation data on Google Scholar.

Recent lab news and updates
December 2025: Graduate student Yang Wang defended his PhD! Congrats Yang!
July 2025: Former PhD student (and undergrad!) Jamal Williams started as faculty at UC Santa Cruz. Congrats Jamal!
June 2025: Postdoc Joey Saito won the Cermak/Corkin Postdoctoral Award from the Memory Disorders Research Society! Congrats Joey!
September 2024: A new postdoc joined the lab, Joey Saito, coming from University of Toronto. Welcome Joey!
September 2023: Two new graduate students joined the lab, Dyllan Simpson (coming from U Toronto) and Isabella Longoria-Valenzuela (coming from Brown Univ). Welcome Dyllan and Isabella!
June 2023: Postdoc Maria Robinson accepted a faculty job at the University of Warwick. Congrats, Prof. Robinson!
June 2023: Graduate student Hayden Schill defended her PhD! She is now Dr. Schill, and a new Assistant Professor at UC Riverside!
April 2023: Two new graduate students are joining the lab next year, Isabella Longoria-Valenzuela (coming from Brown Univ.) and Dyllan Simpson (coming from U. Toronto)! Welcome, Isabella and Dyllan!
April 2023: Tim got promoted to full professor! No more being an assistant or associate :)
April 2023: Grad student Hayden Schill accepted a faculty position at UC Riverside (and got married! and is defending her PhD)! Congrats Hayden!
January 2023: Postdoc Malinda McPherson accepted a faculty position at Purdue University! Congrats Malinda!
September 2022: We have a new postdoc! Malinda McPherson is joining us from Harvard/MIT, and will work on auditory perception and memory!
June 2022: Graduate student Hayden Schill has been elected President of the UC Graduate and Professional Council, where she will represent all UC grads -- fighting for equity in higher education and issues related to climate change!
April 2022: Postdoc Lauren Williams is off to start a new job as a UX Researcher at Google! Good luck, Lauren!
April 2022: Grad student Hayden Schill won a P.E.O. Scholar Award! Congrats Hayden!
March 2022: Grad students Anna Shafer-Skelton and Jonathan Keefe got their PhDs this month, in the same week! Congrats Anna and Jonathan!
March 2021: Grad students Jonathan Keefe and Michael Allen, and postdoc Lauren Williams all won Vision Science Society travel awards! Congrats Lauren, Michael and Jonathan!
Dec. 2020: Tim was awarded the Society of Experimental Psychologists Early Investigator Award!
Dec. 2020: Grad student Anna Shafer-Skelton won an APA Dissertation Research Award. Congrats Anna!
Sept. 2020: We finally published our most important recent paper, Psychophysical scaling reveals a unified theory of visual memory strength, in Nature Human Behaviour. It is explained interactively here.
July 2020: Grad student Isabella DeStefano won the Cognitive Science Society Modeling Prize for Applied Cognition! For her paper with Lauren Oey, Erik Brockbank and Ed Vul, "Formalizing interdisciplinary collaboration in the CogSci community".
July 2020: Grad student Hayden Schill wrote a piece, featured on the Psychonomics Society blog, about the history of feature integration theory.
May 2020: Tim was awarded the Vision Sciences Society Young Investigator Award!
May 2020: Grad student Anna Shafer-Skelton won a Norman Anderson Travel Award to attend the 'virtual' Vision Sciences Society conference. Congrats Anna!
May 2020: Grad student Isabella DeStefano won a grant for using network models to study COVID-19 transmission with her co-advisor, Ed Vul!
Apr. 2020: Undergrad Yonghoon Chung won the Norman H Anderson Research Award, (yay!), and got into all his top choice PhD programs. He choose to attend Dartmouth with Dr. Viola Stoermer!
Apr. 2020: (former) undergrad Annalise Miner got a first author paper accepted in JEP:HPP on the precision of working memory and long-term memory!.
Apr. 2020: Tim had a new baby, Sophia! (it was a collaboration).
Apr. 2020: Grad student Jamal Williams was awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship! Congrats, Jamal!
Apr. 2020: Grad student Isabella DeStefano got an honorable mention for the NSF graduate research fellowship! Congrats, Isabella!
Feb. 2020: Grad student Anna Shafer-Skelton passed Roller Derby tryouts and made the "A" team! Yay, Anna!
Jan. 2020: Tim was awarded the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology!
Jan. 2020: Postdoc (and former PhD student) Jonas Lau is off to start a new job at Google! Good luck, Jonas!
Dec. 2019: Grad. student Hayden Schill won a dept. of Psych. Anderson Travel award to attend the Radiological Society of North America (to present, and to collect data!)
Nov. 2019: Tim was awarded the Psychonomics Society Early Career Award!
August 2019: Maria Robinson, who got her PhD at UIUC, has joined the lab as a new postdoc. Welcome, Maria!
July 2019: The lab has a new doggie! Grad student Jamal got a new dog named Data!
May 2019: Grad student Anna Shafer-Skelton was selected as the Psych Dept's Norman Henry Anderson Scholar for this year! Yay, Anna!
Apr. 2019: Undergrad Yonghoon Chung got an undergraduate research fellowship from the Dept. of Psychology! Congrats, Yong!
Apr. 2019: Undergrad Robert Walter is off to start his PhD with Brian Scholl at Yale! (and in the Philosophy Dept. too!). Good luck, Robert!
Apr. 2019: Undergrad Kelvin Lam is off to start his PhD at UC Santa Barbara with Tommy Sprague. Good luck, Kelvin!
Apr. 2019: Grad student Hayden Schill was awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship! Congrats, Hayden!
Mar. 2019: Grad student Hayden Schill was awarded a travel award for the Medical Image Perception (MIPS) meeting! Congrats, Hayden!
Feb. 2019: Postdoc Mark Schurgin is off to a new, awesome job at Google Health! Good luck, Mark!
Sept. 2018: The lab has three new PhD students: Jamal, Hayden and Isabella. Welcome to the lab!
May 2018: Undergraduate Jamal Williams was awarded the prestigous Norman Henry Anderson Distinguished Undergraduate Scholar award from the Dept. of Psychology!
May 2018: Undergraduate Zeljana Babic was awarded the Norman Henry Anderson Anderson Excellence in Research award from the Dept. of Psychology!
May 2018: Grad student Anna Shafer-Skelton (NSF grad. fellowship winner!) was awarded a FoVea travel award to attend the Vision Sciences Society conference!
Major research projects
Computational models of visual memory
Computational models of visual memory - How can we build explicit models of how visual information is represented and how memory-based decisions are made? Our TCC model unifies distinct measures of memory strength. Learn more...
Structure and capacity of visual memory
Structure and capacity of visual memory - Working and long-term memory share a common representation: noisy and hierarchically structured. How should we measure memory capacity? Learn more...
Knowledge, meaning, and real-world objects
Knowledge, meaning, and real-world objects - How does prior knowledge change what we can hold in mind? People remember far more about meaningful real-world objects than simple features would predict. Learn more...
Scene representation and ensemble perception
Scene representation and ensemble perception - What do we extract from a glance at a scene? We store summary statistics and global texture alongside individual items. Learn more...
Scaling up and applying visual cognition
Scaling up and applying visual cognition - How do our theories play out in the real world? We study radiology expertise, face perception under occlusion, and how people read data visualizations. Learn more...
Resources / Code
MemToolbox
MemToolbox - A Matlab toolbox for analyzing visual working memory data. Learn more...
Object Stimuli Sets
Object Stimuli Sets - Thousands of categorized object stimuli available for download. Learn more...
RelatedReferences
RelatedReferences - Think you might have forgotten an important paper? Enter some references to find the papers that are the most related to them. Learn more...
Journal Rankings
Journal Rankings - A tool to sort and rank psychology and neuroscience journals. Learn more...
Example MATLAB code
Example MATLAB code - Example experiments in Psychtoolbox; code for fitting mixture models, building mosaic images, and more...
Mechanical Turk tutorial
Mechanical Turk tutorial - Approx. 10 hours of videos, plus several examples of how to code and run simple psychology experiments on Mechanical Turk.
Learn more...

Have any questions? Please contact Dr. Brady. Looking for stimuli from the lab's work on animals entraining their movements to auditory beats? Find the videos and more on Adena Schachner's website.


© Timothy Brady