Denise Hsien Wu

Trained as a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist, Denise Wu has conducted extensive research on universal and culture-specific mechanisms underlying the evolved cognitive capacities that set humans apart from other species, namely, language and number processing. During her fellowship year at the CASBS, Wu will expand the scope of her research to work on a project focusing on appreciation of aesthetics, another unique hallmark of human cognition. To understand how we perceive and appreciate beauty in visual stimuli, Wu will take an interdisciplinary approach to identify common computational principles and neural substrates supporting aesthetic judgment across domains of natural kinds and artifacts, including human faces, complex scenes, and Chinese calligraphy, with an emphasis on the effects of culture and experience.

Wu is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the National Central University in Taiwan. Her recent research investigates the bi-directional relationship between statistical learning and language acquisition through behavioral experiments and neuroimaging (ERPs, MEG, and fMRI) techniques. She has received the Junior Research Investigators Award from Academia Sinica in Taiwan (2012) and the Taiwan Outstanding Young Female Scientist Award from Wu Chien-Shiung Education Foundation (2014). She is a fellow of the Psychonomic Society and of the Association for Psychological Science, and currently the director of the Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity at the University System of Taiwan. Wu is the Stanford-Taiwan Social Science Fellow for 2025-26.