General Information
Details
Dr. Varma is a cognitive scientist who uses computational modeling and behavioral experiments to understand those complex forms of cognition that are uniquely human, and indeed make us human. His primary lines of research includemathematical cognition (e.g., human intuitions about geometric and topological concepts), computational thinking (e.g., human solutions of computationally hard problems such as the TSP), language understanding (e.g., the cognitive plausibility of large language models), learning (e.g., continual learning in humans and machines), and problem solving (e.g., optimization under constraints). He also investigates the neural correlations of cognitive mechanisms and the educational implications of cognitive learning principles.
At the undergraduate level, Dr. Varma primarily teaches CS 3790 Introduction to Cognitive Science. This course is part of the B.S. in Computer Science major. He has also offered this as part of the College of Computing's summer program in Barcelona.
At the graduate level, Dr. Varma primarily teaches CS 7651 Human and Machine Learning. This course is part of the M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science programs.
Journal Articles
Marupudi, V., & Varma, S. (2025). Human visual clustering of point arrays. Psychological Review, 132, 1035–1055. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000525
Varma, S., Sanford, E. M., Shaffer, O., Marupudi, V., & Lea, R. B. (2024). Recruitment of magnitude representations to understand graded words. Cognitive Psychology, 153, 101673. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2024.101673
Conference Proceedings Papers
Wang, Z., & Varma, S. (2026). Computer vision model of the development of geometric and numerical concepts. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference om Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), Singapore. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15029
Lalai, H. N., Shah, R. S., Pei, J., Varma, S., & Emami, A. (2025). The world according to LLMs: How geographic origin influences LLMs' entity deduction capabilities. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Language Modeling. Montreal, Canada. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05525
Jun, J., Marupudi, V., Shah, R. S., & Varma, S. (2025, July). Pattern separation and completion in a CLS model of continual learning. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 5046-5052). San Francisco, CA. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6084m9rc
Guo, G., Kang, J. J., Shah, R. S., Pfister, H., & Varma, S. (2024). Understanding graphical perception in data visualization through zero-shot prompting of vision-language models. Poster presented at the Workshop on Behavioral ML, NeurIPS’24, Vancouver, BC, Canada. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00257
Invited Presentations
Varma, S. (2025, November). Machine learning modeling of mathematical concepts and their development. Invited presentation at the LIVE Learning Innovation Incubator, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.
Varma, S. (2025, October). The unreasonable effectiveness of human cognition for solving the travelling salesperson problem. Invited presentation at the Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, University of California – Irvine, Irvine, CA. https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/events/2025/2025-10-23-varma.php