Hi, my name is Dawei Bai.

I am a postdoc at Yale University, where I work with Sam McDougle and Brian Scholl.

I explore high-level representations (e.g., intuitive physics, social agency) in seemingly lower-level systems (e.g., vision, action). I also explore (often surprising) connections between these systems and broader domains of human life, such as religion.

(Next to me was Albert Michotte's original apparatus that led to his pioneering discoveries on causality perception. Leuven, Belgium.)

Publications [Google Scholar]:

• Bai, D., & Scholl, B. (2026). The tiger moving through the tall grass: Spontaneous perception and tracking of change-defined objects from second-order features. Cognition, 276, 106657. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106657
  [PDF]

• Bai, D., Hafri, A., Izard, V., Firestone, C., & Strickland, B. (2025). "Core perception": Re-imagining precocious reasoning as sophisticated perceiving [target article]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1–75. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X25102756
  [PDF]

• Bai, D., & Strickland, B. (2025). The "Double Ring Illusion": The physical constraint of solidity shapes visual processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(12), 3417–3427. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001839
  [PDF] [(Super cool!) Demo]

• Bai, D., & Strickland, B. (2023). The Pulfrich solidity illusion: A surprising demonstration of the visual system's tolerance of solidity violations. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30, 1782–1787. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02271-9
  [PDF] [Demo]

About me [CV]:

I received my Ph.D in 2023 from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France), where I worked with Brent Strickland.

Email: dawei.bai [at] hotmail.com.

(I believe that my website should not look better than my science. So this website will look better once I have done more science!)