People

Robert is interested in the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to flexibly communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with one another in social interactions. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2019 and was a C.V. Starr Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute prior to starting at UW-Madison in 2023.

Claire is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab. She 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 uses naturalistic corpus studies, lab experiments, and computational modeling to characterize the development of communicative competence.

Yuliya is interested in the dynamics of social groups. Her background is in Neuroscience from the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Having previously worked in genetics and molecular biology, she is excited to expand into cognitive science and hopes to pursue a PhD.

Jess is interested in the way humans learn to communicate and interact with one another. They approach these questions using computational models, developmental experiments, and publicly available datasets. They are also affiliated with the Infant Learning Lab. They graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020 with a B.A. in Cognitive Science and were the the Lab Manager for the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University prior to starting graduate school.

Abby is a junior at UW-Madison studying Biology and Psychology. She is interested in how children learn language and is also affiliated with the Infant Learning Lab. She plans to attend medical school and would like to work in pediatrics after graduating.

Misha O’Keeffe is a senior majoring in Economics and Psychology with a Leadership certificate. They also work as a research assistant at the Bonawitz CoCoDev lab and are passionate about children’s rich socio-cognitive development, aspiring to pursue a Ph.D. in the field.

Pranav is a junior at UW-Madison majoring in Computer Science and Math. He is interested in the Architecture behind AI models as well as methods or techniques that can be employed to allow generative content to better resemble human traits. In his freetime, Pranav likes to build esoteric software, play chess, video games, and build legos.

I am a fifth year Psychology PhD student. My primary interest is in the nature of visual concepts. How are they learned? How are they structured? Can machines be taught these concepts? I believe the act of communication can shed much light on the answers to these questions, and so I study how we use drawings and information visualizations to convey our knowledge of the world to each other.

Siddharth’s research interests are centered around the differences and similarities in natural and artificial intelligence systems. He seeks to understand and bridge the gaps between learned representations in humans and AI models, with a goal of developing AI models that align more closely with human semantic cognition.

Wasita earned a BS in Cognitive Neuroscience from Brown University. Currently a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth with Luke Chang, she collaborates with Robert Hawkins and Jonathan Phillips. Her research focuses on how people collaboratively make sense of others and their shared experiences. She employs real-time multi-user web experiments, natural language processing, and computational modeling. Outside of research, Wasita enjoys playing video games (currently: Baldur’s Gate 3) and practicing aerial hoop/pole.

Clementine works in the Visual Reasoning Lab, where she is interested in how people interpret data visualizations, with the goal of understanding how to make visualizations more accessible to broader audiences. Ultimately, this work can be used to make visualization tools, increasing public scientific literacy. Before graduate school, she completed her BS in Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jinyi a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in the the cognitive mechanisms underlying social norm perceptions and inferences. Her recent research focuses on how individual mental model can explain population-level descriptive to injunctive norm shift and how people effectively communicate social norms using online experiments and computational modeling.

Sean is a M.S. Computer Science and Ph.D. Cognitive Science student at UW-Madison. His research focuses on using machine learning to improve human-machine interactions. Prior to graduate school, he completed his undergraduate studies at National Taiwan University.