Vicente Vivanco
Hi! I'm Vicente, a PhD student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where I work in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab with Joshua Tenenbaum. My research asks how people build structured mental representations from complex sensory input, and how those representations support reasoning and planning in the physical world. I'm especially interested in scene understanding and intuitive physics: how we decide what matters in a complex scene, represent it at the right level of abstraction, and use those representations to predict, infer, and solve problems.
I approach these questions through behavioral experiments and computational models, with the broader goal of bridging perception and reasoning. Many current models explain one side or the other well: neural networks can learn rich perceptual features from unstructured data, while probabilistic models capture important aspects of human inference. I'm interested in connecting these traditions to better understand human cognition and to build more human-like AI systems.