Dr. Janet Hsiao is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and a principal investigator of the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in Informatics from University of Edinburgh and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center at University of California San Diego.

As a cognitive scientist, she is best known for her research on learning and visual cognition. She investigates universal principles and specific factors that modulate development of perceptual representations and information processing strategies during learning and expertise acquisition such as face recognition, reading, and object detection and identification. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach, using a variety of methods and techniques from artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience to study the human mind at different levels of analysis and organization. Her unique interdisciplinary approach has deepened and broadened our understanding of individual differences in learning and visual cognition and how they connect to cognitive performance and disorders. In particular, she developed the Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) method to quantify individual differences in eye movement pattern and consistency, which has revolutionized how eye movements are being used to understand cognition. She has also combined EMHMM with deep learning methods to understand the role of human attention in learning and information processing and its implications to the development of explainable Artificial Intelligence.

Her research has been published in leading journals in multidisciplinary research fields, including Psychological Science, Behavior Research Methods, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Learning & Instruction, Sleep, and npj Science of Learning. Dr. Hsiao was a recipient of the Best Language Modeling Paper Prize from the Cognitive Science Society in 2006 and the Early Career Award from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong in 2012. She is now an elected Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and currently serves on the Governing Board of the Society. She is also currently Editor-in-Chief of British Journal of Psychology and an Associate Editor of Cognition.