Alan Stocker

Alan Stocker is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, affiliated with the Neuroscience Graduate Group, Bioengineering Graduate Group, and Computational Neuroscience Initiative. His research focuses on understanding how prior beliefs and expectations shape visual perception, combining theoretical models with psychophysical and physiological experiments. Key areas include optimal inference frameworks, neural coding efficiency, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Education: PhD in Physics (ETH Zurich, 2002); MSc in Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science (ETH Zurich, 1995). Prior appointments include postdoctoral work at New York University and ETH Zurich.

Research Interests: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensation and Perception. Specific projects explore statistical properties of visual environments, subjective expectations from past decisions, and neural computations underlying perception.

Advising: Current advisees include Cheng Qiu (Postdoc), Ansh Soni, and Mengting Fang (Graduate Students). Courses taught: Perception, Visual Neuroscience, and Probabilistic Models in Perception and Cognition.

Labs/Teams: Leads the Computational Perception and Cognition (CPC) Laboratory, emphasizing theory-driven experimentation. Collaborates widely across disciplines including bioengineering and electrical systems engineering.