Hi, my name is De-Wei (David) Dai.
I’m a PhD student at the University of Sydney, under the supervision of Professor Alex Holcombe.
I’m passionate about innovating behavioral paradigms and the methodology of psychophysics, which I believe are the cornerstones for the investigation of consciousness and cognition.
Previously, I completed my Master’s at National Taiwan University and worked in the Brain and Consciousness Lab with Professor Po-Jang (Brown) Hsieh, focusing on visual cognition.
My master’s thesis explores how visual information and its interaction with other sensory modalities influence our perception of time during voluntary action.
I spend most of my time in the office, reading papers and writing code for psychophysics experiments, while listening to shoegaze music (one of my favorite genre). If you don’t see me in the office, I’m probably at these places:
Darkroom:
I do film photography in my spare time, and develop them in a darkroom located on my campus. Doing stuff in an environment without visual information is an eccentric phenomenal experience, which feels unsettling and soothing simultaneously, and the feeling of time is distorted greatly. Nothing to attend to but the inner thought, some of my strangest ideas and insights happen here.
Balls (or 2-D discs on the screen) are the perfect subject to study our visual perception of physical events like collisions.
Kitchen:
I roast and brew my own coffee. It’s fun, sometimes more EXPERIMENTAL than my research, and it’s cheaper than Starbucks.
Nightclub:
I enjoy great electronic music (yes, and I’m picky about it). It’s all about basic acoustic elements, rhythms, anticipation and reward, and the integration of senses and inner thought, unfolding on the dance floor of spacetime.
Restroom:
I have a weak bladder and bowel syndrome.
If you have ANY ideas on how to deal with them, please reach out and help.
De-Wei Dai 