We are a group of scientists studying how the mind works, and how cognition develops in early childhood. Our lab is based in UC San Diego's Department of Psychology and directed by Dr. Adena Schachner.
We are interested in how infants and children come to navigate the social world, by making inferences about the hidden contents of others' minds. To probe this, we study how infants, children and adults infer the goals and preferences of others -- in order to explain their actions, and the objects they own and create.
The lab maintains a secondary focus on music cognition, including the origins of our capacity to move in time with a beat. We often use music cognition as a window into novel aspects of social cognition, leveraging musical phenomena to answer questions about mental state inference.
We use a variety of methods to study cognition in infants, children and adults, both in the lab and around the world via the internet.
