People at the Concepts & Cognition Lab

Dr. Tania Lombrozo, Director

Corey Cusimano
(website) Corey investigates lay theory of mind and moral responsibility. He asks questions such as: what norms govern our beliefs, desires, and emotions?  When, and why, do people expect mental states to change? And, why do people blame and punish others for their mental states? He has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Email: cusimano@princeton.edu.

Telli Davoodi
(website) (email) Telli uses cross-cultural and developmental research approaches to study social cognition. Within this framework, she systematically studies religious cognition and tries to understand the interplay between cognition and culture in the development of specific beliefs about supernatural entities (e.g., God) as well as beliefs about abstract scientific entities (e.g., germs). She is also interested in how early cognitive biases interact with the social environment in shaping beliefs about abstract social constructs like gender, nationality, religion, or the idea of ownership. 

Emily Foster-Hanson
(website) Emily studies how adults and children represent categories and use them to learn. Specifically, her research focuses on why people sometimes think of categories, like different animal species or groups of people, in terms of prescriptive beliefs about what they think they should be like. She has a PhD in Psychology from New York University.

Nadya Vasilyeva
(website) Nadya is interested in what it means to explain and to understand, what gets us there, and why we want to get there in the first place. She studies how different types of explanation contribute to different kinds of understanding, and how this relationship varies with context, domain-specific experience and development.

Graduate Students 

Rachit Dubey
Rachit is a graduate student in computer science and is curious about curiosity. Specifically, his research is aimed at understanding the function, origins, and development of curiosity and how it relates to other aspects of cognition such as reward learning, insight, and metareasoning. By studying these questions through a computational lens, he intends to develop a better theoretical foundation which can hopefully lead to applications in various pedagogical settings. Rachit also works in Tom Griffiths's Computational Cognitive Science Lab at Princeton.

Emily Liquin
(website) Emily is a graduate student in psychology interested in how children and adults actively learn about the world around them. Specifically, she researches when and how we search for explanations, how we evaluate the explanations we receive, and how these explanations contribute to our knowledge and understanding. Emily also works in Alison Gopnik’s Cognitive Development Lab, where she studies exploratory decision-making across development.

 

Kerem Oktar
(website) Kerem is passionate about understanding belief formation and updating. His research aims to unravel the conditions under which these crucial phenomena—forming an opinion and changing one’s mind—occur, both explicitly and implicitly. Currently, he is interested in exploring situations in which epistemic and non-epistemic functions of beliefs are in conflict. He can be reached at oktar@princeton.edu.

Lab Manager

Casey Lewry  
(website) Casey is the lab manager for the Concepts and Cognition lab and the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Her research primarily uses psychology and philosophy methods to study topics such as causal reasoning, moral judgments, and learning. Casey's undergaduate psychology thesis explored teleological (purpose-based) explanations for human existence and their implications for moral judgment. In her philosophy thesis, she argued that intuition must be included in both practical and ideal moral theories.

Undergraduate Research Assistants 

Corey Lau
Corey is an undergraduate at Princeton, majoring in Psychology and pursuing certificates in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience. Corey is interested in studying the concept of Dualism, and how the soul relates to it. After graduation, Corey intends to apply to graduate school or seminary school, and work towards a career in counseling.

Lab Visitors 

Eugenia (Gena) Gorlin
(webite) Eugenia is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University. She pursues interdisciplinary research on the moral, epistemic, and psychological foundations of adaptive self-change. She is particularly interested in what motivates people to think actively and honestly about their reasons for acting, even when doing so is painful or difficult. She  completed her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and her clinical psychology internship training at Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in the cognitive-behavioral treatment of anxiety, depression, and related concerns. 

Former Lab Members

Postdocs

Graduate Students

Staff

Undergraduates