From the noisy information bombarding our senses, our brains must construct percepts that are veridical – reflecting the true state of the world – and informative – conveying what we did not already know. Influential theories suggest that both challenges are met through mechanisms that use expectations about the likely state of the world to […]

How and when infants and young children begin to develop emotion categories is not yet well understood. Research has largely treated the learning problem as one of identifying perceptual similarities among exemplars (typically posed, stereotyped facial configurations). However, recent meta-analyses and reviews converge to suggest that emotion categories are abstract, involving high-dimensional and situationally variable […]

Heterogeneous mental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are notoriously difficult to diagnose, especially in children. The current psychiatric diagnostic process is based purely on the behavioral observation of symptomology (DSM-5/ICD-10) and may be prone to misdiagnosis. In order to move the field toward more quantitative diagnosis, we need advanced and scalable machine learning […]