Ran Ji (Sara)
Hi! I'm Ran (Sara) Ji, a Psychology student at UC San Diego. Before UCSD, I studied Psychology and Cognitive Science at UC Davis. I am drawn to questions about how children and intelligent systems learn, reason, misunderstand, and grow.
My recent work sits between developmental psychology, child mental health, and AI cognition. I spend time with the VBVR Team, Grow AI, the ASPIRE Program, and the MIND Institute at UC Davis.
Things I Think About
- How AI systems reason through videos, scenes, and social perspectives
- How confidence, uncertainty, and self-awareness appear in vision–language models
- How early gestures and language shape child development
- How culture affects mental health, stigma, and help-seeking
- How classrooms can become kinder places for emotional expression
Selected Work
- VBVR: A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite
- Demystifying Video Reasoning
- Grow AI: Metacognition & Egocentric Bias in VLMs
- ASPIRE: What Parents Notice — Gesture & Vocabulary
- Mental Health, SEL, and Psychodrama Education
Papers
-
A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite
ICML 2026arXiv:2602.20159 [cs.CV]
- Demystifying Video Reasoning
-
Egocentric Bias in Vision-Language Models
CogSci 2026arXiv:2602.15892 [cs.AI]
-
Metacognition in Vision–Language Models
CogSci 2026
Contact & Links
Email: r9ji@ucsd.edu
La Jolla, CA
COGS127 case studies (compare):
A — Structured reply discovery
B — Cross-cultural threads & video-in-comments