Hi! I'm Wesley Leong (he/him).

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in Psychology (Language and Cognition) at the University of Connecticut, advised by Gerry Altmann. I study topics at the intersection of neuroscience, computation, and language.

I'm currently working on a two lines of research under the umbrella theme of similarity: (1) What are the consequences of (dis)similarity on object representation? (2) How does similarity affect between how we represent labels and concepts? To understand these processes in the mind and brain, I use a combination of behavioral tasks and neuroimaging. Check out our recent preprint, where we find a link between the neural processes underlying visual working memory and object change in language. Or our recent proceedings paper on labels and concepts, which is work in collaboration with Eiling Yee.

I was previously a research engineer at Halo Neuroscience in San Francisco, where I studied the effects of transcranial electrical stimulation on human performance. Before that, I graduated from New York University with a BS in Neuroscience, where I wrote my thesis in Eric Lang's Lab on time perception in the rat cerebellum. I also did some work in linguistics, including an MEG study in the Neurolinguistics Lab and a project on tense variation in Singapore English.

On a related note, I am from the tiny island nation of Singapore. I also boulder sometimes (V12 in your gym), and have recently gotten into throwing plastic at trees.