Holly Huey.

Applied Cognitive Scientist. Benchmarking human behavior & communication to improve generative AI visualization tools.

Hi there! I'm a 5th-year PhD Candidate in Experimental Psychology at the University of California San Diego.
I'm advised by Dr. Judith Fan @ The Cognitive Tools Lab.

My research uses large-scale crowdsourcing techniques to benchmark how people create and interact with visual media. In my graduate research, I've specialized in conducting a wide range of visuospatial & generative behavioral tasks to study human visual communication. I've also conducted developmental research using drawing to study children's conceptual development of visual object concepts.

My approach combines a mixture of quantitative & qualitative methods to characterize these behaviors. With these insights, I hope to help improve generative AI models mimicking human generative behaviors and human-centered tools aimed at supporting human-AI interactions related to: text-to-image-generation, audience design, object identification, and semantic segmentation

Here's my latest resume.

Bio: I grew up on Whidbey Island, WA. As an introverted teenager on a rural island, I spent most of my time sketching and hiding away in ceramics studios. After two art apprenticeships and then double majoring in Philosophy and History of Mathematics & Sciences from St. John's College, I became fascinated by how novel visual media (e.g., Cartesian coordinate system, periodic table, Vitruvian man) across history helped catalyze and communicate major scientific discoveries. Despite this critical role of visual media in human innovation, relatively little is known about the cognitive processes that underlie how people communicate via images, by comparison to language. This question continues to inspire my research throughout my graduate program.

research domains

SKETCHES

Since the first cave art, drawings have been a window into how people organize their knowledge into symbolic representation. By collecting & analyzing large-scale drawing datasets by humans, AI models, and children, my work aims to investigates how people interpret the visual objects and scenes in their environments.

*In recent work accepted to NeurIPS, my collaborators and I crowdsourced & analyzed >90K drawings generated by both humans and generative sketch AI!

ABSTRACT DIAGRAMS

Visual explanations are at the core of human innovation & design. How do people's goals to convey higher-level knowledge about physical mechanism shift how they produce diagrams? This line of work investigates how people prioritize different kinds of semantic information and what behavioral impact their representational choices have on viewers.

DATA VISUALIZATIONS

In our modern era, data visualizations have become a critical tool to understand large-scale information & reveal predictive statistical trends. However, even more simple graphs (barcharts, linecharts, scatterplots) require years of education to understand & make them. By analyzing how people answer different questions about graphs, my work aims to identify different ways of visualizing data can lead to more effective graph design & comprehension.

While my dissertation research is focused on these three domains, I have also explored & published work in other domains, such as human visuospatial perception, social pragmatics, navigation, and symbolic reasoning. See my below publications for more information.

publications

journal articles
Huey, H., Lu, X., Walker, C.M., & Fan, J.E. (2023). Explanatory drawings prioritize functional properties at the expense of visual fidelity. Cognition.
PDF Poster Publisher's Page
Long, B., Fan, J., Huey, H., Chai, R., & Frank, M. C. (preprint). Parallel developmental changes in children's production and recognition of line drawings of visual concepts.
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*Huey, H.,*Jordan, M., & Dillon,. M.R. (2023). Shortest path problems on different geometric surfaces: Reasoning about linearity through development. Developmental Psychology.
PDF Publisher's Page
Aboody, R., Huey, H., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2022). Preschoolers decide who is knowledgeable, who to inform, and who to trust via a causal understanding of how knowledge relates to action. Cognition.
PDF Publisher's Page
Jara-Ettinger, J., Floyd, S., Huey, H., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Schulz, L. (2019). Social pragmatics: Four and five-year-olds rely on commonsense psychology to resolve referential ambiguities. Child Development.
PDF Publisher's Page

peer-reviewed conference proceedings & posters
*Mukherjee, K., *Huey, H., *Lu, X., Vinker, Y., Aguina-Kang, R., and Fan, J.E. (2023). SEVA: Leveraging sketches to evaluate alignment between human and machine visual abstraction. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2023
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*Huey, H., *Oey, L.A., Lloyd, H.S., and Fan, J.E. (2023). How do communicative goals guide which data visualizations people think are effective? Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Sydney, Australia: Cognitive Science Society.
PDF Poster
*Mukherjee, K., *Huey, H., *Lu, X., Vinker, Y., Aguina-Kang, R., and Fan, J.E. (2023). Evaluating machine comprehension of sketch meaning at different levels of abstraction. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Sydney, Australia: Cognitive Science Society.
PDF Poster
Lloyd, H.S., *Huey, H., Brockbank, E., Padilla, L., and Fan, J.E. (2023). What is graph comprehension and how do you measure it? Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Sydney, Australia: Cognitive Science Society.
Abstract Poster
*Huey, H., *Long, B., Yang, J., George, K., and Fan, J.E. (2022). Developmental changes in the semantic part structure of drawn objects. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.
PDF Poster
Nagabandi, M., Yang, J., Huey, H., Fan, J.E. (2022). Decomposing objects into parts from vision and language. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.
Abstract
Huey, H., Walker, C.M., & Fan, J.E. (2021). How do the semantic properties of visual explanations guide causal inference? Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (Virtual Meeting) Vienna, Austria: Cognitive Science Society.
PDF Poster Video
Aboody, R., Huey, H., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2018). Success does not imply knowledge: Preschoolers believe that accurate predictions reveal prior knowledge, but accurate observations do not. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
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Aboody, R., Huey, H., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2017). Success does not imply knowledge: Preschoolers believe that accurate predictions reveal prior knowledge, but accurate observations do not. Poster presented at the Cognitive Development Society's Bi-Annual Meeting 2017.
Poster

workshop presentations
Mukherjee, K., Huey, H., Rogers, T., & Fan. J.E. (2022). From Images to Symbols: Drawing as a Window into the Mind. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society. Co-organizer of workshop & co-designer of website.
Website PDF
Pitt, B., Huey, H., Jordan, M., Hart, Y., Dillon, M.R., Bottini, R., Carstensen, A., Boni, I., Piantadosi, S., Gibson, E., Marghetis, T., Holmes, K.J., Star-Lack, M., & Chacon, S., (2022). Dimensions of Diversity in Spatial Cognition: Culture, Context, Age, and Ability. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society. Invited speaker.
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