People

My research focuses on the structure and origin of knowledge, guided by perspectives and methods from cognitive science, cognitive development, and computational modeling. By combining these, I hope to better understand the form and development of the basic commonsense reasoning that guides our interaction with the world and the people in it.

Dr. Bass scrutinizes the role of social information in shaping and constraining children's inferences through empirical work with children and adults, and with computational models that formally capture these cognitive processes.

Dr. Qian is interested in questions about how people think, interact, and communicate. He combines behavioral experiments and computational models to study language and cognition. Dr. Qian's current research seeks to understand the intentional use of ambiguity in social life.

Dr. Chu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the CoCoDev Lab. She earned a doctorate in Cognitive Science from MIT in 2023 where she worked with Laura Schulz, and her B.S. in Child Development from Vanderbilt where she worked with Dr. Bethany Rittle-Johnson. She is broadly interested in the nature and development of creative thought: how do we solve, select, and construct novel problems? At CoCoDev, Junyi studies these questions in the context of play.

Dr. Hu is interested in the computational and cognitive principles underlying human language and communication. Her research involves a combination of computational modeling, machine learning, and behavioral/neuroimaging experiments, with the dual goals of understanding the human mind and safely advancing artificial intelligence.

Dr. Hu's research is funded by the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. 

Felix uses the spaces of theoretical computer science, programming languages, and evolutionary theory to advance our understanding of the generative processes behind human intelligence.

Eric is interested in using experimentation, modeling, and theory to explore the relationship between intuition and formal reasoning in cognition, and how people learn concepts in abstract domains such as science, programming, and mathematics.

Yichen is interested in using methods from cognitive science, computational modeling, and neuroscience to understand the mechanisms behind human common-sense reasoning, the underlying representations and computational shortcuts for abstract concepts, and the operations that enable our compositional thoughts and flexible generalizations.

Yingqiao is interested in utilizing the methods from mathematics, statistics, and computational modeling to investigate the topics in causal reasoning and intuitive physics.

Sonia is interested in bridging the fields of cognitive science, natural language processing, and human-AI interaction to advance our understanding of human-machine communication and design systems that better serve humans' goals and intentions. 

Kiera is a research assistant working concurrently in the CoCoDev Lab as well as the ECCL as a a post-baccalaureate Research Assistant. She is broadly interested in children’s social cognition and the role social influences play in children’s learning. Kiera graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Psychology and Political Science. Prior to joining the ECCL, Kiera worked as a lab manager at Swarthmore College and as a preschool teacher and museum educator. 

Jiayi is broadly interested in developmental social cognition. Her current project investigates how children reason about magical events that conflict with the laws of the physical world. Jiayi received her B.A. in Psychology and Japanese from Boston University. Before joining CoCoDev, she worked as a research assistant in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University as a CSLI intern. 

Whitney is a faculty support specialist working within in the psychology department. Whitney supports the Northwest Psychology Faculty and labs, including the Ullman Lab, Gershman Lab, Phelps Lab, Somerville Lab, and Buckner Lab). Before joining Harvard, she graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston and received a B.A. in Psychology and English.

Yuki is interested in high-fiving and cuddling with the CoCoDev Lab members!