Joan Ongchoco

Dr. Joan Ongchoco is the Director of the Perception & Cognition Lab at the Department of Psychology at UBC. Her lab explores how perception -- what is it that we see -- interacts with broader mental life. The lab is especially interested in the border between perception and cognition. For instance, visual processing is typically understood as extracting low-level properties, such as color, orientation, motion. In contrast, her lab has found that perception may also traffic in properties that are otherwise associated with higher-level thought, such as causality, intuitive physics, or even more abstract concepts of telicity (i.e., whether an event is finished or not).