Nicole Sahrling
Undergraduate researcher | Psychology | UC San Diego
Hello! I'm a rising fourth-year undergraduate psychology student at UC San Diego and an honors thesis student in the Visual Learning Lab (PI: Dr. Bria Long). I'm curious about how children communicate what they know, especially through language and drawing, and how we can use tools from cognitive science and machine learning to better understand those representations.
You can email me at nsahrling [at] ucsd [dot] edu
Research
My research examines how children form and express concepts across language and vision, and how computational models can reveal the structure of these representations. I am broadly interested in conceptual development, visual perception and attention, high-dimensional data analysis, and using AI-based embedding methods to understand the emergence of cognitive representations.
Currently, I am leading a year-long honors thesis with Dr. AJ Haskins in the Visual Learning Lab that tracks the semantic overlap between young children's descriptions and drawings of sea animals throughout development. This work involves in-person data collection with families and exploratory large-scale analyses of high-dimensional data using CLIP and related embedding models.
Previously, I also spent two wonderful quarters working with Bill Pepe in the Social Cognition and Learning Lab (PI: Dr. Lindsey Powell), where I learned a great deal about early social reasoning, infant research methods, and collaborative team science.
Feel free to reach out to me, happy to connect!