Alex Caldwell

Undergraduate Computer Science Student

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About

Hello! I am a junior at Vanderbilt University majoring in Computer Science. My career interests center on data science in healthcare, with a particular focus on objective detection of concussion and sub-concussive brain injury. I'm drawn to the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience, and hope to apply computational tools to advance early, objective diagnostics for brain health.

Research Interests

Neural Network Architectures Brain Alignment Multimodal Integration Cognitive Science Machine Learning

Current Research Projects

Object Morphs

This project uses smooth morphs between object concepts to probe where perception draws its boundaries in humans and AI. At its core is the THINGS Latent Morph Benchmark: using Stable Diffusion and baseline interpolation methods, we create continuous image transitions between 200 pairs of object concepts and gather over 90,000 human behavioral responses to map exactly where people place category boundaries and how perceptual uncertainty changes along each trajectory. We then benchmark eight major vision models, including CLIP and DINOv2, using Representational Similarity Analysis and psychometric curve fitting to pinpoint where artificial representations diverge from human categorical perception. Extending these morphs across the senses, we also investigate semantic binding windows—the range within latent semantic space over which visual and auditory stimuli are perceptually integrated—drawing parallels to the temporal binding window observed in multisensory integration.