We study the cognitive processes that allow children to understand other people, and the social meaning of things people create, such as tools, art, music, and technology. We also explore the origins of musicality, asking why human musicality is so early developing and socially impactful from early in life. Our work has been funded by the NSF, NIH, APF, and GRAMMY Foundation.
The UCSD Mind and Development Lab is directed by Dr. Adena Schachner, and is based in UC San Diego's Department of Psychology. We are a member of the UCSD Kid Science Labs.
June 2025:
Congrats to Dr. Alexis Smith-Flores, who has successfully defended her dissertation and is moving on to a faculty position at Lehigh University!
Congratulations to the lab's outstanding graduating research assistants in the class of 2025, including well-deserved congrats to winners of undergraduate awards in psychology (Amy Nguyen, Emma Tai, Ray Yin, & Presley Bodenshot), and to Alan Lopez, who is next starting a psych PhD program at U. Wisconsin-Madison working with Martha Alibali; and Amy Nguyen, who is next starting as lab manager at Princeton working with Diana Tamir!
Check out the lab's publications page for full-text preprints, including our new paper on causal reasoning about musical sounds in Developmental Science; and papers on the social representation of the physical world, including a fun piece with Julian Jara-Ettinger in Current Directions in Psych Science.
June 2024:
Congratulations to the lab's outstanding graduating research assistants in the class of 2024 - Kai Yi (Kaye) Han, Rob Santiago, Alexa Duran, and Katrina Camacho!
Our lab's two graduating senior honors students will both be starting psychology PhD programs in the fall -- congrats to Kai Yi Han (moving on to Northeastern U) and Rob Santiago (moving on to Cornell U)! Graduating RA Alexa Duran will be starting at her top choice clinical masters degree program (at SDSU)! Congrats all!!!
March 2024:
Congratulations to Dr. Adena Schachner, who has received tenure and been promoted to Associate Professor! 🎉
January 2024:
Congratulations to Dr. Tanushree Agrawal, who has won the 2024 Dissertation Award from the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity!
October 2023:
Welcome to incoming PhD student Rodney Tompkins! Welcome also to our new undergraduate researchers!
Congratulations to Dr. Tanushree Agrawal, whose work on how other's aesthetic motivations impacts our thinking about their social behavior and mental capacities was just accepted for publication in Open Mind!
June 2023:
We look forward to welcoming incoming PhD student Rodney Tompkins! A huge congratulations to Rodney on winning the NSF GRFP AND the UCSD Jacobs Fellowship to support his graduate work!
Congratulations to newly-minted PhD Dr. Lauren Oey, who defended her dissertation on June 2nd, 2023!! Dr. Oey is moving on to a postdoc at Princeton University.
Congratulations to our fabulous graduating research assistants in the class of 2023 - Amber O'Brien, Lance Tiu, and Kylie Cassutt (who is moving on to a PhD program at UC Berkeley)!
January 2023:
Congratulations to newly-minted PhD Dr. Tanushree Agrawal, who defended her dissertation on Jan. 31st, 2023!! Dr. Agrawal is continuing at UCSD as an Assistant Project Scientist and Lecturer, teaching several excellent undergraduate courses!
December 2022:
Congratulations to newly-minted PhD Dr. Minju Kim, who defended her dissertation on Dec 5th, 2022!! Dr. Kim is moving on to a post-doc at the UCSD Teaching + Learning Commons, where she will be engaged with both research and pedagogy!
November 2022:
Former postdoc Madison Pesowski's paper (with Lindsey Powell, Mina Cikara, and Adena Schachner) on interpersonal utility and children's social inferences from shared preferences has been accepted to the journal Cognition! Congrats Madison!
October 2022:
Our paper on the role of expectancy effects in synchrony-prosociality research has been accepted for publication in the journal Open Mind! This work is with collaborators S. Atwood and Sam Mehr. Read the preprint here!
August 2022:
Grad students Tanushree Agrawal, Minju Kim, and Chaolan Lin presented their work as talks at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition in Portland, OR -- and last month Tanushree also presented her work at the Cognitive Sciences Society meeting in Toronto!
Grad student Tanushree Agrawal's paper on hearing water temperature (aka the development of auditory event perception) was accepted for publication at Developmental Science! Congrats Tanush!
Post-doc Madison Pesowski started her new position as faculty at the University of the Fraser Valley! We'll miss you Madison, and we're glad to still collaborate over Zoom and Slack!
June 2022:
Grad student Minju Kim's paper on the origins of dance in infancy was accepted for publication in Developmental Psychology! Congrats Minju!
Grad student Lauren Oey's paper on the role of theory of mind and recursive social reasoning in lying behavior was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General! Congrats Lauren!
Congratulations to our fabulous graduating seniors, Diana Wang, Leila Latham, and Jubilee (Izzy) Shroff!
April 2022:
Post-doc Dr. Madison Pesowski has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the University of the Fraser Valley! Big congrats Madison!
February 2022:
Grad student Tanushree Agrawal's paper on musicality and moral decisions was accepted for publication in the Psychology of Music! You can read it here! Congrats Tanushree!
July 2021:
We published our recent findings on children's understanding of perception and physical interaction over video chat in the journal Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies. Congrats to all of the hardworking research assistants and graduates who worked on the project!
Our graduate students Minju Kim, Lauren Oey, and Alexis Smith-Flores, as well as our Postdoc Madison Pesowski presented their research at the annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. You can check out some of their presentations here!
June 2021:
Grad student Tanushree Agrawal, along with Drs. Adena Schachner, Joshua Rottman, and Mike McCollough, was awarded a grant from the Grammy Foundation to fund her work on musicality and moral behavior! Big applause!
January 2021:
Four of our undergraduate Research Assistants presented research at UCSD's Lab Expo! Heidy Davila presented "From music to animacy: Adults' causal reasoning about sound", Angela Mak and Joanna Jain presented "Effective disambiguation in communication through gesture", and Franco Mercado presented "Social inferences from artifacts: Young children use artifacts to infer others' mutual interests". Way to go - we're so proud of you!
July 2020:
Grad student Lauren Oey won the Cognitive Science Society Modeling Prize for Applied Cognition for her paper with Isabella DeStefano, Erik Brockbank, and Ed Vul, "Formalizing interdisciplinary collaboration in the CogSci community". Congrats Lauren!
Members of our lab attended the first virtual conference of the year. You can see some of the presentations we gave here.
June 2020:
Postdoc Madison Pesowski was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada!
May 2020:
We are so excited to announce that Dr. Schachner (our PI) received an Outstanding Mentor Award! Congratulations!
January 2020:
Two of our undergraduate Research Assistants, Finiva Ednalino and Maxine Covello, as well as our lab coordinator, Alyssa Quy, presented at UCSD's Lab Expo! Finiva and Maxine presented on children's ability to hear the temperature of water being poured, and Alyssa presented findings on the development of intuitive archeological reasoning. Great posters with interesting findings!
September 2019:
Madison Pesowski, who received her PhD at the University of Waterloo, has joined the lab as a new Postdoc. Welcome Madison!
July 2019:
Graduate students Ethan Hurwitz and Lauren Oey presented their new findings at the annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Ethan also won a travel and research award to attend the conference! Go MaD lab!