Alicia Liu 刘天好

Hello! I’m Alicia, a PhD student in computational cognitive neuroscience, advised by Tyler Bonnen. I research how the brain builds structured models of the world from experience, how these models are selectively and idiosyncratically activated when processing new information, and how biased models can be updated through new experiences.

Previously, I was advised by Yuan Chang (YC) Leong and Xuechunzi Bai at the University of Chicago, where I received my BA in Philosophy and BS in Computer Science.

Some questions I’ve been interested in: Along what principle axes is memory organized? When is abstract knowledge versus episodic details retrieved? How are representations transformed by retrieval? How are representations factored compositionally and then recombined in novel contexts?

I believe memory is fundamental to explaining the flexibility of intelligence, biological or artificial. Beyond that, (episodic) memory is also interesting to me in a different way: it comprises our identity as individuals; the ‘self’ is a bundle of episodic memories. Thus I feel very lucky to be able to study processes that form the very building blocks of who we are - “the meaningful segments of one’s life, the coherent units of one’s personal history” (Beal and Weiss, 2013). Before going to the empirical side, I also approached these questions in philosophy, where I was interested in self-creation and personhood/moral patienthood.