I am a research scientist at Harvard University working primarily with Dr. Elizabeth Spelke. I am also a research associate at UC Berkeley where I collaborate with Dr. Fei Xu.

 

I received my PhD in Cognitive Science from Brown University under the supervision of Drs. James Morgan and Dave Sobel in 2019. In 2023, I completed an F32 NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University, where I worked with Dr. Sandra Waxman.

 

My research explores the origins of human communication about items or phenomena that are unavailable, unobservable, or abstract. In daily life and in educational settings, we rely on language to learn about things we have not experienced directly, such as historical figures, remote places, others’ thoughts, or abstract concepts like ‘infinity.’ This impressive communicative power of language is grounded in our ability to establish, retrieve, and modify mental representations of the unseen (unheard, untouched, etc.) based on language. I investigate how and when this ability develops.

 

In particular, I ask: (1) when and how we infer that language transfers information from one mind to another, and (2) when the link between words and representations of the unseen first emerges and how it shapes our learning. Earlier, my dissertation research explored (3) how young children use their emerging linguistic and social capacities to make inferences about others’ knowledge based on language and learn from them judiciously. 

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I use a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures and employ live acting, video-recordings, video-chat, corpus analysis, surveys, and online apps in my investigations. I conduct research with children under 6 years old and adults.

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Aside from conducting my own investigations, I lead the Social Contingency Consortium – an global interdisciplinary collaboration of 170+ scholars from 30+ institutions worldwide. The main goal of the consortium is to understand behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the facilitative role of social contingency in learning.