Current Lab Members

Click on each person's name to learn more about their work.

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Dr. Caren Walker, Principal Investigator

Caren Walker is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. Dr. Walker’s research is in the area of cognitive development, examining the various learning mechanisms that underlie knowledge acquisition and change. This work addresses basic questions about the nature of mental representations in human cognition, and she is particularly interested in the early development of abstract reasoning about causality.

Dr. Walker has been named a 2021-2023 Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow!


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Alex Rett, Graduate Student

Alex is a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. She received her BSc and MASc from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada where she studied children’s learning and language development. She is broadly interested in how children develop scientific reasoning skills and how cues from the learning environment impact children’s causal reasoning. Currently, her work focuses on children’s recognition of abstract information, such as causal structure, and how recognition of causal structure may facilitate learning during childhood. She is also interested in how different features of the learning environment impact learning, such as visual information and design, prompts to predict or explain, and how children’s expectations of information influences persistence.


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Tiffany Wang, Graduate Student

Tiffany is a seventh-year graduate student in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. She received her BA and BS in Psychology and Human Biology from UCSD. After graduating, her research mainly focused on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focused interventions and the implementation of these interventions in community settings.  Her current research is focused on causal reasoning in children with ASD. Specifically, she is interested in what mechanisms children with ASD use when reasoning about causality as well as the differences in how they approach physical and social causal relationships.


Salih Özdemir, Graduate Student

Salih is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. He received his BA from Bogazici University and MA from Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey. He is interested in how we come up with explanations, and in the sorts of information we seek when we are conceptualizing the causal world. His research explores how children reason, make judgments, and talk about causal relationships.


Rose Reagan, Graduate Student

Rose is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. She is broadly interested in how we come to make sense of the social world and our place in it, especially integrating concepts of social identity and group membership. How does who we are influence the ways in which we learn, make decisions, and integrate information? How do we craft representations of complex social categories and hierarchies? Further topics she’s excited about include the interplay between causality and sociality, dynamics of bias, and intersecting identities. Before coming to UCSD, she was Dr. Alison Gopnik’s Lab Manager at UC Berkeley, and she’s (proudly!) from Pittsburgh, PA.


Sophie Mazor, Graduate Student

Sophie is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. She received her BS in Cognitive Science from UCSD in 2024. She is broadly interested in how children form and revise their beliefs when faced with uncertainty or inconsistent information. Her research explores how young learners decide when to update their beliefs and how they make sense of uncertainty to develop complex understandings about the world around them. She is also interested in how explanation, agency, and the strength of prior beliefs guide these processes.


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Ethan Hurwitz, Postdoctoral Researcher

Ethan is a postdoctoral research fellow in the UCSD Department of Psychology and Center for Psychedelic Research. His work seeks to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying psychedelic therapy. He is particularly interested in the role of cognitive flexibility and using cognitive development as a model to bridge the levels of analysis in psychedelic science.

Website


Isabel Sichlau, Lab Coordinator

Isabel graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a BPhil in Psychology and a BA in Spanish. At Pitt, she worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Kids’ Thinking Lab examining early math skill development and wrote a thesis on the associations between maternal and paternal spatial talk and their toddlers’ spatial skills. Isabel is broadly interested in math and science learning, specifically in early educational environments.


Research Assistants


Collaborating Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Researchers


International Lab Members

The Early Learning & Cognition Lab partners with the Junior Researcher Programme in support of their international apprenticeship for psychology students and young researchers. Our team of student researchers, supervised by Alex Carstensen, explores how language, culture, and cognitive maturation influence the development of relational reasoning. This project examines preschool-age children across five countries that are culturally and linguistically diverse to determine which features of a child’s learning environment shape the developmental trajectory of their early relational reasoning abilities.


Collaborators


Lab Alumni



Ph.D. Students

Elizabeth Lapidow graduated in 2023 with her PhD in Psychology. She is now a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Stephanie Denison at the University of Waterloo.

Erik Brockbank graduated in 2023 with his PhD in Psychology. He is now a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Tobias Gerstenberg at Stanford.

Jae Engle graduated in 2021 with her PhD in Psychology. She is now the Graduate Coordinator for UCSD’s Department of Psychology.

Isabella Killeen graduated in 2018 with her PhD in Psychology. In 2021, she graduated with her J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School.



Lab Coordinators

Alexis Burke (2023-2025), now PhD student in linguistics at UC San Diego.

Aarthi Popat (2021-2023), now PhD student in developmental psychology at Yale University.

Trisha Katz (2019-2021), now PhD student in developmental psychology at Duke University.

Nicky Sullivan (2017-2019), now PhD student in developmental psychology at Stanford University.

Andie Nishimi (2015-2017), now Wellness Coordinator at Miramonte High School.



Undergraduate Research Assistants

Manasha Sahana Vengat, Research Assistant

Deborah Hughes, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Giovanni Thomas, Research Assistant

Iliana Kleiner, Research Assistant

Jesly Perez, Research Assistant

Mariah Muñoz, Research Assistant

Christine Kwon, Research Assistant

Noemi Estrada, Research Assistant

Starla Thomas, Research Assistant

Shanthi Kuppa, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Crystal Coffey, Research Assistant

Jessica Benson, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Emily Songvilay, Research Assistant

Andrea Ortiz, Research Assistant

Kathleen Nguyen, Research Assistant

Julia Hoffman, Research Assistant

Makayla Thornburg, Research Assistant

Alexia Harris, Research Assistant

Kevin Phelan, Research Assistant

Constanza Perez-Romero, Research Assistant

Lauren Wong, Research Assistant

Libni Magana, Research Assistant

Abigail Dominguez, Research Assistant

Katerine Quevedo-Herrera, Research Assistant

Cheng Xu, Research Assistant

Farmaeliane Lai, Research Assistant

Emmanuel Gutierrez, Research Assistant

Kiana Aguayo, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Ashna Singh, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Haley Litt, Research Assistant

Yuting Shen, Research Assistant

Reyna Bottone, Research Assistant

Nil Beserler, Research Assistant

Ellie Ferd, Research Assistant

Kristy Kim, Research Assistant

Jolie Nguyen, Research Assistant

Banso Nguyen, Research Assistant

Rebecca Gin, Research Assistant

Lynnea Mayorga, Research Assistant

Ayumi Bindley, Research Assistant

Olimpia Carrioli, Research Assistant

Devon Dye, Research Assistant

Mia Real, Research Assistant

Meryem El-Ansari, Research Assistant

Danae Krikorian, Research Assistant

Lacey Oneal, Research Assistant

Jake Truong, Research Assistant

Tushita Tandon, Research Assistant

Tiffany Geng, Research Assistant

Jenny Zhu, Research Assistant

Naz Behdinan, Research Assistant

Allison Morgan, Research Assistant

Marcus Franco, Research Assistant

Shaina Casey, Research Assistant

Mylon Kemp, Research Assistant

Silvana Mendoz, Research Assistant

Jessica Ray, Research Assistant

Annika Jallorina, Research Assistant

Silvana Mendoz, Research Assistant

Fritzi Landeros, Research Assistant

Anna Gruszka, Research Assistant

Cesia Haro-Rojas, Research Assistant

Brendan Hwang, Research Assistant

Johanna Walker, Research Assistant at UC Berkeley

Antonia Grunert, Research Assistant

Maddie Weerts, Research Assistant

Sally Tang, Research Assistant

Montana Taylor, Research Assistant

Alania Salazar, Research Assistant

Paul Simental, Research Assistant

Xioyang Chu, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Natalie Palmberg, Research Assistant

Bea Florentino, Research Assistant

Amy Bennett, Research Assistant

Celeste Brown, Research Assistant

Liliana Robertson, Research Assistant

Christyn Jackson, Research Assistant

Kyle Hausheer, Research Assistant

Carmen Oendain-Soto, Research Assistant

Jess Wallach, Research Assistant

Brenna Yob, Research Assistant

Cristy Tran, Research Assistant and STARS Mentee

Noor Alomar, Research Assistant

Esther Chau, Research Assistant

Jessica Ray, Research Assistant and STARS Mentee

Vineeth Alluri, Research Assistant

Kamilah Cunanan, Research Assistant

Emily Wildes, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Juliet Ealy, Research Assistant

Helen Fu, Research Assistant

Ashley Garrison, Research Assistant

May Jaber, Research Assistant

Shantel Leyva, Research Assistant

Lalin Ozyazgan, Research Assistant

Alexandra Leevers, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Jared Baumgartner, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Ruth Bagcus, Research Assistant

Hazel Baker-Harvey, Research Assistant

Carolyn Collora, Research Assistant

Natalie Godfrey, Research Assistant

Nirav Patel, Research Assistant

Joelle Robinett, Research Assistant

Angela Wu, Research Assistant

Amanda Stroiman, Research Assistant

Abigail Sumi, Research Assistant

Jordan Viernes, Research Assistant

Sarah Gan, Research Assistant

Daylin Anderson, Research Assistant

Emily To, Research Assistant

Lorna Liu, Research Assistant

Sierra Ampudia, Research Assistant

Nadia Keddo, Research Assistant

Phuoc Tran, Research Assistant

Caitlyn Lanigan, Research Assistant

Taylor Ossman, Research Assistant

David Lee, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Alicia Lunardhi, Research Assistant

Disha Goel, Research Assistant and Honors Thesis Student

Yashna Bowen, Research Assistant


Research Partners