Sophie Bridgers
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.
Rosie Aboody
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.
