Cognitive scientist Lauren Aulet has always been fascinated by how we see and understand the world — a curiosity sparked in childhood by a book of optical illusions. Now, as a new faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she’s exploring visual perception and how people perceive numbers, space, and physical judgements.
Aulet’s research centers around how the brain constructs the visual and numerical world — and how those processes develop. “Our perception of the world isn’t just a direct picture of what’s out there,” she explains. “Our brain is involved in actively constructing our view of the world.” That early fascination with illusions matured into a research career at the intersection of numerical cognition, visual processing, and developmental psychology.
One of her standout projects while studying at Emory University involved training dogs to stand still and view visuals while inside an fMRI scanner. Aulet and her team discovered that, like humans, dogs have a brain region that responds more strongly to changes in quantity — hinting at a shared, perhaps evolutionarily ancient, “number sense” across species.
In humans, she’s explored how young children rely heavily on spatial representations to grasp abstract numerical concepts, like looking at numbers on a ruler increase from left to right. “You can’t point to the concept of ‘two’...but you can use different kinds of spatial groundings that help kids learn how to use numbers,” she says. Her findings suggest that early math learning is deeply rooted in visual and spatial cognition.
At UMass Amherst, Aulet is launching a new research program that dives into even more foundational aspects of human cognition. Her upcoming studies will investigate “intuitive physics”—how people perceive object stability and make judgments about whether a specific object should fall over due to gravity. She’s also planning to examine mental rotation, probing how our brains manipulate 3D objects in our minds.
“It's an interesting thing about these areas that it can be hard to tell whether you're seeing something or you're just thinking it. We have to do in-depth experiments to figure out the answer,” Aulet notes. She hopes to gain more insight through behavioral experiments and visual adaptation studies.
Looking ahead, Aulet is particularly enthusiastic about the collaborative environment at UMass. With several colleagues also studying how children learn to count and reason with numbers, she sees great potential for progress. “We're already planning to potentially have a reading group or joint lab meetings,” she says.
Aulet is looking forward to building her lab team and welcoming new students. “I'm most excited to see who joins the lab…I have a lot of different research interests, what we work on first will be driven by what my students’ interests are,” she says.