Bella is a graduate student studying how people form mental models of competence, both their own and other agents', and when those models lead them astray. Previously, Bella studied young children's cognitive development, including toddlers' intrinsic motivation to explore their own competence. Her current projects examine when and why people defer decisions to AI across domains (e.g., moral, legal, etc.), and how surface features of AI outputs, such as perceived fluency, implicitly bias people's trust and deference in LLM-generated explanations. She can be reached at [email protected].