About me...
I’m a PhD Student 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 during my PhD, I’ve investigated 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 around CT, playing the accordion, or making myself
a cup of tea.
