Hongjing Lu

Professor Hongjing Lu is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research explores how humans learn and reason under conditions of sparse, ambiguous, and noisy data, with applications to understanding intelligent systems in both biological and artificial contexts.

Her work integrates theories and methods from Psychology, Statistics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Computational Neuroscience. Key research themes include:

• Exploiting generic priors for learning/inference
• Manipulating structured representations in perception and cognition
• Interdisciplinary approaches to motion perception, action recognition, and object recognition
• Connections between human cognition and AI systems

Her publications span journals like Nature Communications, Nature Human Behavior, Psychological Review, and PLoS Computational Biology, focusing on analogical reasoning, causal learning, and neural mechanisms of perception. She leads the Computational Vision and Learning Lab at UCLA.