Maya Taliaferro is a K. Lisa Yang post-baccalaureate research scholar working concurrently in the ECCL and the language labs at MIT with Dr. Evelina Fedorenko and Dr. Ted Gibson. In 2021 Maya received her BA in Neuroscience from Hamilton College with a minor in Japanese. Her passion for learning the Japanese language is what ultimately inspired her to study language in the mind and brain generally. Her primary interests lie in understanding how multilingual speakers reason about language pragmatically – that is, the ability to understand non-literal aspects of language – and how this ultimately informs differences in communication between one’s native and non-native languages.

I am a student at Smith College (‘24, gap year) studying neuroscience and Italian. I hope to pursue an MD/PhD; and, I envision studying pediatrics, child psychiatry, or child neurology in the medical route and either developmental psychology or developmental cognitive neuroscience in the university route. Although I am interested in attachment theory, play, and early adversity right now, I am so excited to hone my interests and continue the process of discovery! Beyond academics, I am a classical violist, and one of my favorite research endeavors is to explore music in different ways (for example, hosting my radio show, Memos From the World at Smith). I am always thrilled to talk about jazz, opera, classical, ethnomusicology, the neuroscience of music, and more! In my free time, I love to bike on the Charles River and on the Cape, attend music performances, and, most especially, travel to Rome.

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I’m a senior at MIT, studying cognitive science and computer science. My current research (with Junyi Chu) focuses on goals and planning in play. I’m also interested in the development of moral and social cognition, and probably many other topics I’m not yet aware of.

Karolina Cabrera Orellana got her associate degree in liberal arts Psychology at Quincy College, after that she transferred to UMass Boston where she is currently a third year student in pursuit of a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Working at ECCL MIT as a Lab Fellow since 2020.

Max Siegel is a postdoc in the Computational Cognitive Science group at MIT. His Ph.D work in the same laboratory was supervised by Josh Tenenbaum as well as Laura Schulz and Josh McDermott.

Max's research concerns recognition (or "identification") of concepts, in particular novel perceptual concepts, and their productive use in cognition. His thesis proposed that people can interpret a class of unfamiliar perceptual stimuli and scenarios -- compositional concepts -- by composing domain theories or "simulators", and gave behavioral and computational evidence for compositional simulation in adult and child perception and cognition.

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Sophie Bridgers is a Simons postdoctoral fellow in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab; she also works with Dr. Tomer Ullman (Harvard Psychology). Though humans are motivated to cooperate, figuring out how best to cooperate is far from trivial. You must understand what another person wants, you must balance what they want with what you want, and you must plan and execute an action that achieves the negotiated, joint goal. The overarching goal of Sophie’s research is to behaviorally, developmentally, and computationally characterize the social-cognitive mechanisms that support human cooperative decision-making in all of its complexity and nuance: when it is successful, when it backfires, and when it is intentionally subverted. Sophie completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at Stanford University, where she worked with Dr. Hyowon Gweon. She also holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.

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Herrissa Lamothe is a postdoctoral fellow with Josh Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz. She previously completed her Ph.D. at Princeton University in Sociology. She is interested in intuitive sociology, that she characterizes in terms of social kinds which include social categories (e.g. race, class, gender); and social meanings which capture our symbolic hypotheses about the ways in which we are socially connected. She is also interested in developing a theory of central cognition that imports insights from the structure of our social concepts; and posits a computational model architecture for how the mind acquires its concepts and categories – including its social ones.

Rosie Aboody is an NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab; she also works with Dr. Elizabeth Bonawitz (Harvard Graduate School of Education). She completed her PhD at Yale, working with Julian Jara-Ettinger.

Rosie studies how we come to understand and reason about other people's knowledge and beliefs—an ability that many uniquely-human behaviors rely on, from teaching to moral judgments. Drawing on developmental and computational approaches, Rosie studies how adults infer what others know or believe from their behavior, and how these capacities develop during the preschool years. On the side, Rosie has also been enjoying developing a theoretical account of fake-news beliefs that can explain why children and adults often find widely-repeated claims believable.

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I am the Executive Director of Lookit, a website that lets families participate in cognitive development experiments from home. Lookit hosts experiments for research groups around the world; if you are interested in getting started with the platform please have a look here! Previously, I was a graduate student and postdoc in BCS, and am returning to MIT after a stint at the Center for Open Science where I worked on a large-scale project studying the reliability of claims in social science journals.

I am passionate about improving our scientific practices as social scientists, including promoting replication, data sharing, and large collaborations to improve the reliability of what we learn about the minds of young children. My work combines creating solutions for researchers with empirical research on how our habits and tools as scientists impact the results we report. These interests are a direct result of my own research experiences, and I see attention to our scientific practices as intimately related to the specific theories we study and the data we collect and interpret.

My graduate and postgraduate research focused on how early cognitive development informs how we understand language learning, and how the resulting adult language reflects these early representations. Specifically, I am fascinated by how children learn to use syntactic structures such as the transitive (Jane broke the lamp) and periphrastic causative (Jane made the lamp break). This work finds that early conceptual representations of causation and motion support how young toddlers make inferences about particular events in the world and choose what to say to get their own meanings across. I have also conducted research on how these argument structures shape our linguistic abilities at the cognitive and neural levels.