My name is Marvin, and I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and AI Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where I work in Alan Stocker's lab. I study how brains and computational models of cognition make systematic errors.

Cognitive biases

Why would your brain evolve to underuse evidence that contradicts your beliefs? My current research focuses on confirmation bias: the tendency to behave as if past choices were useful guides. Rather than treating this as a flaw, I'm investigating the normative reasons brains might have developed this bias. I am generally interested in the trade-offs that make brains efficient, particular when that goes wrong.

Visual illusions

During my PhD at Dartmouth College (with Peter Tse and Patrick Cavanagh), I studied how the visual system gets fooled. We worked on tracking (overtly and covertly) and visual illusions like the double-drift illusion and the frame effect, where objects appear in locations where they aren't. These "mistakes" of our perceptual systems are some of the best windows we have into how perception actually works.

AI and perception

More recently, I've started asking whether deep neural networks are susceptible to the same illusions and biases humans are. When do artificial and biological vision agree, and when do they diverge?

Everything else

I'm originally from Munich, Germany. I also did some octopus research during my PhD and I hope some of that will be published soon. In my free time I enjoy trying the many great burgers in the US and, for some reason, reading weird blogs.

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