Welcome to the Wong Attention Vision & Encoding (WAVE) Lab!

Our lab explores visual perception and cognition — investigating the mental processes that underlie how we take raw visual input from the world (a mess of lines and colors) and make sense of it (e.g. forming representations of "objects" and "agents"), guiding our everyday function.

In short, our research delves into the (often) surprising answers to questions such as: "What do we actually see?" and "How do we parse the world into meaningful mental representations?"

June 2026: Excited to have all three lab members as paid research assistants for the summer. Here's to great productivity away from the chaos of the semester! We celebrated the end of VSS & the semester with all-you-can-eat sushi (see image below for very full and satisfied lab members).

May 2026: Maggie, Neel, and Eva successfully finished their very first conference poster session! Huge congrats. Stay tuned as we continue to explore the interesting differences in both temporal and spatial memory when participants viewed images of women vs. men...

April 2026: We have been working hard getting pilot experiments up and running. Excitingly, work has paid off and we will be attending VSS 2026! See you all there, at the undergraduate poster session.

December 2025: Our lab is officially full! Maggie Nichols, junior, will joining the lab beginning in Winter Study. As a well-rounded student in many different areas of psychology, Maggie will be diving into the intersection of cognitive and social psychology.

October 2025: Excited to welcome Eva Liss, freshman, to the lab! She's powering through papers, and getting immersed into the world of cognitive psychology!

September 2025: Neel Verma, junior, joins the lab! He's hit the ground running with brainstorming experiment ideas already, and is diving into code.

July 2025: The WAVE Lab officially begins operation on campus, located in Wachenheim Science Center! Now recruiting undergraduate research assistants to begin in either Fall 2024 or Spring 2025. Learn more on our Join Us page.

July 2025: The WAVE Lab website has been setup! We are excited to get the lab started and to get to know all the students (particularly in the classes that Dr. Wong will be teaching, Intro Psych and 221 Cog Psych).