Amber X. Chen

I am Amber X. Chen, a PhD candidate in Social Psychology in the Yu Emotion Science Lab (YES Lab) and Master’s student in Computer Science at UCSB, expected to graduate in 2027.

I study how person perception is formed and updated in social contexts, and how people mentally represent their social world. My research focuses on how we integrate visual information (e.g., faces) and conceptual knowledge when forming impressions of others. Using behavioral trait ratings, neuroimaging and eye-tracking, combining with visual and language models, I examine these processes in controlled settings, such as when people view familiar figures like celebrities.

Extending this work to real-world settings, I investigate how person perception evolves within entire social networks over time. This approach allows me to uncover how the brain encodes social structure and builds social cognitive maps that guide our understanding of others and navigation in the social world. Ultimately, I aim to bridge person perception and social structure by revealing how individual impressions scale into representations of the broader social world.