Cognitive and Psychological Sciences

William Warren earned his undergraduate degree at Hampshire College (1976), his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Connecticut (1982), did post-doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh, and has been a professor at Brown ever since. He served as Chair of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from 2002-10. Warren is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship, an NIH Research Career Development Award, Brown's Elizabeth Leduc Teaching Award for Excellence in the Life Sciences, the 2023 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science from the Vision Sciences Society, and Brown’s 2025 Distinguished Research Achievement Award. Warren’s research focuses on the visual control of action – in particular, human locomotion, navigation, and collective motion. He seeks to explain how this behavior is adaptively controlled by visual information, within a dynamical systems framework. Using virtual reality techniques, his research team investigates problems such as the visual control of walking, collision avoidance, wayfinding, pedestrian interactions, and the collective behavior of crowds. Experiments in the Virtual Environment Navigation Lab (VENLab) enable his group to manipulate what participants see as they walk through a virtual world, and to measure and model their behavior. The aim of this research is to understand how adaptive behavior emerges from the dynamic interaction between an agent and its environment. He believes the answers will not only be found in the brain, but will strongly depend on the physical and informational regularities that the brain exploits. This work contributes to basic knowledge that is needed to design assistive technology for people with visual-motor disabilities, to improve evacuation planning, and to develop social robots that can interact with pedestrians.