Judith Fan
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Studies how people use visual abstractions such as sketches, and computational models of these cognitive tools.
Judith Fan's lab at Stanford works on computational neuroscience & cognition. 46 papers since 2023, 5 at top venues, mostly CHI and Nature Communications. 6 PhD students. 22 alumni, most often to Adobe and Apple. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 12/ year
- at T1 venues
- 11%
- PhD students
- 6
- MS students
- 0
- alumni listed
- 22
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 11 papers2026 · T1 2 · collecting
- 11 papers2025 · T1 0
- 11 papers2024 · T1 1
- 13 papers2023 · T1 2
T1 venuesOtherVenues: CHI, Nature Communications, Findings of EMNLP, ICML
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- people6 papers
- Computational neuroscience & cognition0 papers
- psychology0 papers
- use0 papers
- computational models0 papers
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
202611 papers
- Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.Artists’ drawing strategies serve to overcome visual processing limitations. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Asking the right questions? What people learn about strangers in conversation. (opens in a new tab)
- Behavior Research Methods.Drawings of THINGS: A large-scale drawing dataset of 1,854 object concepts. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.From chopped to cooked: Design and inference in physical environments. (opens in a new tab)
- Current Directions in Psychological Science.Generative behaviors as key targets for cognitive models. (opens in a new tab)
- CHI (T1)Gesturing toward abstraction: Multimodal convention formation in collaborative physical tasks. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Leveraging speech to identify signatures of insight and transfer in problem solving. (opens in a new tab)
- Current Directions in Psychological Science.Meaningful long-term thought partnerships of minds and machines. (opens in a new tab)
- CHI (T1)Portraying large language models as machines, tools, or companions affects what mental capacities people attribute to them. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.What makes an action sequence enjoyable to watch?. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.What reusable shortcuts do people propose when solving assembly problems?. (opens in a new tab)
202511 papers
- TopiCS in Cognitive Science.Cross-contextual variability in children’s early understanding of visual media. (opens in a new tab)
- Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.Evaluating convergence between two data visualization literacy assessments. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.How do we get to know someone? Diagnostic questions for inferring personal traits. (opens in a new tab)
- Cognitive Science.Humans Select Subgoals That Balance Immediate and Future Cognitive Costs During Physical Assembly. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Investigating children’s performance on object- and picture-based vocabulary assessments in global contexts: Evidence from Kisumu, Kenya. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Linking student psychological orientation, engagement, and learning in college-level introductory data science. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Measuring and predicting variation in the difficulty of questions about data visualizations. (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of EMNLPmrCAD: Multimodal Communication to Refine Computer-aided Designs. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Late Breaking Work.Portraying large language models as machines, tools, or companions affects what mental capacities humans attribute to them. (opens in a new tab)
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).SketchAgent: Language-Driven Sequential Sketch Generation. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.What makes people think a puzzle is fun to solve?. (opens in a new tab)
202411 papers
- Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition.Communicating design intent using drawing and text. (opens in a new tab)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV).Counterfactual World Modeling for Physical Dynamics Understanding. (opens in a new tab)
- Cognition.Creating ad hoc graphical representations of number. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Evaluating human and machine understanding of data visualizations. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition.How do video content creation goals impact which concepts people prioritize when generating B-roll imagery?. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.How does assembling an object affect memory for it?. (opens in a new tab)
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).Open vocabulary semantic scene sketch understanding. (opens in a new tab)
- Nature Communications (T1)Parallel developmental changes in children’s production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Probabilistic simulation supports generalizable intuitive physics. (opens in a new tab)
- Nature Human Behaviour.Using games to understand the mind. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Without his cookies, he’s just a monster: a counterfactual simulation model of social explanation. (opens in a new tab)
202313 papers
- Cognitive Science.Consistency and variation in reasoning about physical assembly. (opens in a new tab)
- Developmental Psychology.Developmental changes in drawing production under different memory demands in a U.S. and Chinese sample. (opens in a new tab)
- Nature Reviews Psychology.Drawing as a versatile cognitive tool. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Evaluating machine comprehension of sketch meaning at different levels of abstraction. (opens in a new tab)
- Cognition.Explanatory drawings prioritize functional properties at the expense of visual fidelity. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.How do communicative goals guide which data visualizations people think are effective?. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Humans choose visual subgoals to reduce cognitive cost. (opens in a new tab)
- ICML (T1)Learning dense correspondences between photos and sketches. (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Measuring and modeling physical intrinsic motivation. (opens in a new tab)
- Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Datasets and Benchmarks Track).Physion++: Evaluating Physical Scene Understanding that Requires Online Inference of Different Physical Properties. (opens in a new tab)
- Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Datasets and Benchmarks Track).SEVA: Leveraging sketches to evaluate alignment between human and machine visual abstraction. (opens in a new tab)
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.Socially intelligent machines that learn from humans and help humans learn. (opens in a new tab)
Where alumni went22 listed, 47% to industry
Industry 7Academia 8
Most often to
- Adobe
- Apple
- Meta
Also to
- MIT
- UC San Diego
- Cornell University
Apply to StanfordFall 2027
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