Current Lab Members
Click on each person's name to learn more about their work.
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!
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.
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 second-year graduate student in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. He received his BA in Psychology from Boğaziçi University and MA in Cognitive Psychology from Koç University in İstanbul, Turkey. He is interested in how children think and talk about causal and abstract relations. His research explores reasoning about underlying mechanisms of causal systems, such as how children predict certain causal outcomes and whether they can explain the underlying processes. He is curious about how intuition, explanation, and exploration interact in guiding children to conceptualize the causal world.
Rose Reagan, Graduate Student
Rose is a first-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.
Ethan Hurwitz, Postdoctoral Researcher
Ethan is a postdoctoral research fellow in the UCSD Department of Psychology and Center for Psychedelic Research (link to website for CPR https://cpr.ucsd.edu). 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.
Alexis Burke, Lab Coordinator
Alexis graduated from Scripps College with a BA in Linguistics. While an undergraduate, they worked with young children as a preschool teacher’s assistant and as an RA in the UCLA Language Lab and wrote an honors thesis on the indexing of nonbinary gender through speech. Alexis is interested in children’s social and linguistic learning through self-directed exploration and pretend play, and she is passionate about the relationship between cognition research and early education pedagogy.
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
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
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
