Alston Lantian Xu

Alston grew up in Shanghai (China) and pursued his undergraduate study at the City University of Hong Kong where he continued as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Dr. Alvaro Cassinelli at the Augmented Materiality Lab, School of Creative Media. Being exposed to diverse people and cultures, he was fascinated by how people interact with each other regardless of their “properties”. 

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As a cognitive science researcher, he specialises in exploring spatial cognition, delving into how people perceive and navigate the space around them. He employs a range of methodologies, from experimental studies with human participants to computational modeling. A portion of his recent work has concentrated on understanding the impact of predictive processing on cognition—aligning objects at positions with our body positions and movements would expedite the recognition. He introduces a new variable, spatial placement, to the mental rotation experiment, uncovering evidence for a non-linear relationship between the angle of rotation and the time it takes to identify. This contradicts traditional views that suggest a proportional correlation. His research adds new perspectives to the understanding of two processes during spatial cognition, predicting and matching. The end goal is to advance our knowledge of spatial navigation and perception, ultimately informing the development of new human-computer interaction models with both 2D and 3D interfaces.