Qianying Wu, Ph.D.

Qianying Wu is a third-year graduate student in Caltech’s Social and Decision Neuroscience (SDN) program. Before joining Caltech, Wu received her bachelor’s degree in biosciences from the University of Science and Technology of China. Wu is interested in studying social behaviors in autism. Currently, she is completing her doctoral thesis on observational learning and naturalistic social attention, with a specific focus on autism. One of her major projects is to identify audiovisual features from naturalistic movies that drive eye gaze heterogeneity across autistic and neurotypical adults. In general, her research incorporates computational models to analyze behavioral, eye-tracking and fMRI data. In 2020, Wu received the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Graduate Fellowship Award at Caltech.

Principal Investigator: Ralph Adolphs

Fellows: Emily Corona Galindo & Qianhui Hong

Undergraduate Fellow Project:

In this project, the SURFiN fellow will work closely with a graduate student (Qianying Wu) to explore blinks and pupil changes in response to audio and visual features from naturalistic movies and compare these measurements between autism and control participants.
The fellow will have access to two eyetracking datasets with naturalistic movie-watching tasks:1) a high-quality dataset collected with a desktop eyetracker (20 healthy participants and 20 participants with high-functioning autism), and 2) a large-sample dataset that will be collected over the internet using webcam-based eyetracking (as part of the SFARI 2022 Human Cognitive and Behavioral Science RFA we were recently awarded).
To analyze the data, the fellow will:1) identify blinks and pupil dilations from the eyetracking data, 2) extract audio and visual features from the video stimuli, 3) build individualized regression models to predict blinks and pupil changes using the video features, and 4) compare parameters from individualized models between the autism and control group.
In addition to the data analysis, the student will have extensive opportunities to interact with our autism participants, observe the ADOS administration, and gain experience in data collection. The student will also be co-mentored by principal investigator Ralph Adolphs and postdoctoral fellow Na Yeon Kim.