Isaac Ray Christian

Greetings! Welcome to the best website there ever was! Just kidding – this is just your run-of-the-mill personal website detailing all the fun stuff I’ve been up to over the years :). How silly and simultaneously necessary it is to summarize a life in this way.

I am a cognitive neuroscientist and machine learning (AI) researcher.  I completed my doctoral training at Princeton University, where I was advised by Michael Graziano, Yael Niv, and Uri Hasson.

In my dissertation project, I asked: ‘Are attention mechanisms aligned in artificial neural networks and humans when performing a social reasoning task? The short answer is – kind of. Some mechanisms – such as gated attention – approximate human gaze better than others, like similarity-based (transformer) attention.

More broadly, my research considers representing minds – both self and other agents – from a computational (e.g., artificial neural network modeling, drift diffusion modeling, reinforcement learning) and neuroscientific perspective (fMRI: general linear modeling, encoding models, representational similarity), with the aim of creating socially intelligent AI informed by human cognitive principles.

As an undergraduate, I was trained in business and entrepreneurship. I founded a virtual reality and shared social experience application emphasizing the group perspective rather than the individual-first paradigm common in social media. Later, I explored contextual differences in neural connectivity between individuals with autism and neurotypicals under the mentorship of Jillian Wiggins. 

I believe that life is worth living because of the people that we get to experience it with. 

Professionally, I’ve been surrounded by incredibly kind and intelligent individuals that have shaped my personal and professional attitudes. Notably: 

And I had the pleasure of advising these exceptional students:

See the ‘About’ page for more details!