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I recently graduated with my PhD from Yale University, where I was primarily advised by Julian Jara-Ettinger in the Computational Social Cognition Lab, and collaborated with Brian Scholl in the Perception and Cognition Lab.

My research during graduate school focused on understanding how people extract social information from objects, such as how we recognize that a coat on a chair likely means it is occupied or that a ball in the road likely means children are playing nearby, and formalizing these inferences as computer programs. In my work, I utilized a blend of behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and psychophysics.

Before Yale, I was a McNair Scholar at the University of Central Florida, where I studied electrical engineering with minors in computer science and mathematics.

news

Jun 16, 2023 Our paper, People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals, was accepted in Cognition!
May 4, 2023 I successfully defended my dissertation!
Jul 28, 2022 Our paper, Social inferences from physical evidence via Bayesian event reconstruction, was accepted in JEP: General!
Mar 8, 2022 I was invited to give a talk about my work in the Causality in Cognition Lab.

selected publications

2023

  1. predicted_agent_behavior.png
    People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals
    Michael Lopez-Brau and Julian Jara-Ettinger
    Cognition, 2023

2022

  1. path_reconstructions.png
    Social inferences from physical evidence via Bayesian event reconstruction
    Michael Lopez-Brau, Joseph Kwon, and Julian Jara-Ettinger
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022