Kushin Mukherjee

I am a fifth year Psychology PhD student at UW-Madison. My primary interest is in the nature of visual concepts. How are they learned? How are they structured? Can machines be taught these concepts? I believe the act of communication can shed much light on the answers to these questions, and so I study how we use drawings and information visualizations to convey our knowledge of the world to each other.

I'm based in the Knowledge and Concepts Lab, Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab, and Social Interaction Lab at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. I've also been very fortunate to be a Kohler Fellow at WID, which has let me think about how science and art can intersect to give rise to fun new ideas. I believe we do our best science when working collaboratively as groups and so I can often be found in virtual meeting rooms with members of the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford, Visual Intelligence and Technological Advances Lab at York, and Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Lab at Princeton.

I grew up in Kolkata, India, a bustling city with hot summers and torrential monsoons. Noticing a distinct lack of snow in my climate collection, I moved to upstate New York, where I received my BA in Cognitive Science and Japanese from Vassar College. While at Vassar, I was advised by Ken Livingston and Josh de Leeuw. I also spent a summer at the Computation and Cognition Lab at Stanford as a CSLI intern, working with Judy Fan and Robert Hawkins (and continue to today!).