Research

Understanding the connection between relationships and empathy.

What do emotions convey about social relationships, and conversely, how do humans integrate their understanding of relationships into their predictions of others’ emotions? 

Connecting others’ emotions and their representations of the world.

Emotions are not automatic consequences of particular experiences; they are the result of the appraisals and desires of the person experiencing them. Not everyone reacts positively to a particular team scoring a goal, for example. Here, I ask how children use  emotions as information about, and components of, other people’s representations of the world. 

Domain-specificity vs. domain-generality in infant cognition.

Decades of infant research have used looking-time paradigms to provide insight into infants’ understanding of the world around them. I ask how infants’ looking reflects individual differences in cognition and explore analytical approaches to understanding their behavior.