About me...

I’m a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. I completed my PhD in Psychology at Yale University working with Julian Jara-Ettinger at the Computational Social Cognition Lab and Laurie Santos at the Canine and Primate Lab. In the broadest terms, I am interested in what makes humans special relative to even our closely-related nonhuman primate relatives. Many of the things that humans are especially good at (teaching, deceiving, cooperating) require us to think about the minds of others. So much of my research investigates this question by looking at primate social cognition, specifically, Theory of Mind.

In humans, I study how we use our ability to infer others’ mental states and predict others’ actions in order to make our own behavior more understandable to those around us. Most obviously, this occurs in the context of communicative interactions in which you are trying to make both your communicative goal and specific message apparent to your intended recipient. However, I’m also interested in the ways in which we broadcast our mental states outside of explicitly communicative moments as well. I use behavioral, comparative, cross-cultural, and computational approaches to gain a fuller picture of this incredible capacity to flexibly reveal our own mental states.

However, humans are far from the only species that navigate complex social environments, nor are they the only species that does so by attributing unobservable internal states to others. While my work with humans focuses on the elaborate and strategic ways in which we use our theory of mind, I also work with rhesus macaque monkeys to better understand the foundational elements of their theory of mind. My research focuses on better understanding the processes of inference and action prediction, which transform observable actions into inferred mental states (and vice versa). Although these processes form the bedrock of Theory of Mind, they remain poorly understood in our primate relatives.

When I’m not thinking about thinking, I’m usually hiking, playing the accordion, or making myself a cup of tea.