Current Researchers
Faculty Sponsors
Professor Carstensen's research on the theoretical and empirical study of motivational, cognitive, and emotional aspects of aging has been funded continuously by the National Institute on Aging for more than 30 years. Carstensen is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the…
I am interested in how people hold others responsible, how these judgments are grounded in causal representations of the world, and supported by counterfactual simulations.
Kalanit Grill-Spector is a Professor in Psychology and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Her research examines how the brain processes visual information and perceives it. She uses functional imaging techniques to visualize the living brain in action and understand how it functions to…
I am broadly interested in the human ability to reason about others, learn from others, and inform others in communicative contexts. How do we construct rich, abstract theories about how the world works from our everyday experiences that often involve other people, and how do we communicate what…
I direct the Social Interaction & Language (SoIL) Lab at Stanford University. We're interested in the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to flexibly communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with one another. We work on these problems using large-scale, multi-player web experiments and…
Professor Obradović’s research examines how the interplay of children’s physiological stress arousal, self-regulatory skills, and quality of caregiving environments contributes to their health, learning, and well-being over time. She also studies how caregivers’ executive functions and emotion…
Dr. Elizabeth Schumann has a diverse career portfolio of projects, recordings, and performances which have brought her all over the world as recitalist, chamber musician, and concerto soloist. The Washington Post noted her playing as “deft, relentless, and devastatingly good—the sort of…
Researchers
I'm interested in the study of cognitive development and language development in particular. Intrigued by the intersection between language and cognition from a cross-cultural perspective.
Humans start off as universal novices in a world with lots to discover. I’m interested in how we build an understanding of the social and physical world around us, especially how we iterate on our understanding of ourselves and our capabilities as causal agents within that world. I’m excited…
Claire Bergey researches how the constraints of communication shape the way people learn and use language. Some recent projects have focused on how children expand their repertoires of conversational moves, and how we use language to selectively remark on atypical things in the world. Her work…
Knowing that today’s children are future centenarians is Dr. Growney’s biggest motivation for her work as a New Map of Life Fellow. She believes that having positive, meaningful interactions with older adults during one’s childhood will be fundamental in forming the aging attitudes of these…
Elizabeth is a PhD student in Neuroscience area at Stanford Department of Psychology. She is interested in the intersection of visual experience and the development of the visual system, and computational modeling. Elizabeth holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and Medicine,…
Our unique collaborative skills are widely viewed as the key to our success, both as a species and as individuals. The roots of these skills emerge already in infancy and continue to develop in early childhood, as children learn to coordinate their actions with others through behaviors like…
Anna is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Life-span Development Lab. She is interested in how social experiences, including social connections, behaviors, and language use, influence emotional and cognitive well-being across the lifespan. Her current research investigates how perceptions of others…
Bobby is the current lab manager of Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford. He received his B.S. in Symbolic Systems with a focus in Cognitive Science from Stanford University where he was a research assistant in the Social Learning Lab. He is interested in variability in our developmental…
Ishani is a research coordinator for the SPARK Lab's MAGIC project. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Educational Studies from Colby College. She is interested in exploring influences on executive functioning and how educational…
Thea Wulff is a research coordinator for the SPARK Lab's MAGIC project. She earned an Honors B.S. in Psychology from the University of Utah, with minors in Human Development and Family Studies and Philosophy. She also…
Humans are active learners and teachers - we integrate information from our environment, reason over it, and transmit it to others. I am interested in the processes and representations that enable this ability and their foundations in development. I hope to use a wide variety of methods to…
My research investigates when and how children acquire, and consequently learn from, symbolic systems such as language and pictures. In one line of research, I investigate the mechanisms underlying children’s acquisition of various kinds of non-literal language, such as metaphor and metonymy, as…