Hello! I’m Yi Gao, and welcome to my lab website. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nebraska Omaha (since January 2026).

I earned my B.A. and B.S. at the University of Jinan, and then completed my M.S. at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences with Dr. Min Bao, where I began studying visual plasticity - especially visual adaptation. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Reno with Dr. Fang Jiang, collaborating with Dr. Michael Webster, where I continued investigating visual adaptation and expanded into multisensory integration. I then spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech under the supervision of Dr. Dobromir Rahnev and Dr. Woon Ju Park. There, my work broadened from early sensory processing to metacognition, with a focus on how sensory biases (e.g., adaptation) and decisional biases jointly shape subjective experience and confidence. I also study clinical and special populations, including older adults, individuals with visual impairments and people who are blind or deaf.

Across these projects, I use a combination of psychophysics, computational modeling, and fMRI.

At UNO, my lab investigates how sensory and decisional biases shape subjective perception. Current interests include visual adaptation, multisensory integration, visual illusions, metacognition, and their intersections.

For more details, please see the Research page. If you are interested in collaborating, feel free to email me at yigao@unomaha.edu.