Richard Yao is a cognitive psychologist who studies the construction and representation of conscious reality from visual perception. As a research scientist for Oculus and then Meta, his work contributed to optimizing the physical comfort and immersion of the world’s first mass-market virtual reality headsets. He received his Ph.D. in psychology in 2013 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he wrote his dissertation on a novel method he discovered for inducing change blindness.