Karen Tian -

I am a cognitive neuroscientist studying visual perception. How do our brains make sense of the visual world? What neural dynamics support perception as it unfolds across time? I study these types of questions using psychophysical, neuroimaging, and computational modeling approaches. I am a postdoctoral researcher with Rachel Denison at Boston University, where I recently completed my PhD. Before then, I was an RA with Marisa Carrasco at NYU and did my undergraduate studies at Yale. In some intervening years, I worked in visual design. I like to draw many things but am often asked to draw brains.

Selected publications and preprints

Dynamic cortical routing mediates temporal attention
Zhu, J, Tian, KJ, Carrasco, M, & Denison, RN.

bioRxiv (2026).

pdf | html

Time-resolved decoding of uncertainty about stimulus features from human EEG.
Nestor, J, Tian, KJ, Chapman, AF, & Denison, RN.

bioRxiv (2026).

pdf | html

Voluntary temporal attention improves perception even in the absence of temporal competition.
Tian, KJ*, Motzer, JA*, & Denison, RN.
bioRxiv (2026).
pdf | html

When awareness outstrips performance: critical tests of subjective inflation under inattention.
Tian, KJ*, Maniscalco, B*, Epstein, ML, Shen, A, Graham Castaneda, O, Kurosawa, T, Motzer, JA, Olsson, E, Russell, EE, Walsh, ME, Wang, J, Bek Awrang Zeb, T, Brown, R, Lamme, VAF, Lau, H, He, BJ, Brascamp, JW, Block, N, Chalmers, D., Peters, MAK^†, & Denison, RN^†.
bioRxiv (2025).
pdf | html

Temporal attention amplifies stimulus information in fronto-cingulate cortex at an intermediate processing stage.
Zhu, J, Tian, KJ, Carrasco, M, & Denison, RN.
PNAS Nexus (2024).
pdf | html

Anticipatory and evoked visual cortical dynamics of voluntary temporal attention.
Denison RN*, Tian, KJ*, Heeger, DJ, & Carrasco, M.
Nature Communications (2024).
pdf | html