I am an NIH NRSA postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, working with Dr. Sandra Waxman.

 

I received my PhD in Cognitive Science from Brown University under the supervision of Drs. James Morgan and Dave Sobel. I am also a research associate at UC Berkeley where I collaborate with Dr. Fei Xu.

 

I investigate the development of symbolic communication and language-mediated knowledge acquisition in three complementary lines of work:

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1. The development productive links between words and mental representations, which enable learning from language about things one has not experienced directly;

2. ​The role of social contingency in the development of these links;

3. Downstream consequences of word-representation links, such as the ability to make inferences about others' knowledge based their use of language.

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I use a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures and employ live acting, video-recordings, video-chat, and online apps in my experimental manipulations. I also use computational models and corpus analysis in my research.

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Aside from conducting my research, I lead the Social Contingency Consortium – an interdisciplinary collaboration of 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 human and animal learning.