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.

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.

I’m a software developer on the Lookit team who specializes in creating the software and systems used to run behavioral experiments online. Lookit is a website run by the ECCL that allows families to participate in cognitive developmental experiments from home. My work on the team involves adding new features, testing, debugging, improving documentation, and offering technical support.

Mark is an Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Minerva University, and a research affiliate of Keck Graduate Institute, Yale University, and MIT. His research in developmental psychology has focused on the development of moral behavior, as well as how children learn from explanations. His current focus is on developing infrastructure for online developmental research, including as part of TheChildLab.com at Yale, Lookit.mit.edu at MIT, and a multi-university collaboration ChildrenHelpingScience.com.

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Junyi Chu is a postdoc at the Harvard Computation, Cognition, and Development Labs with Tomer Ullman and Elizabeth Bonawitz. She completed her PhD in the ECCL, advised by Laura Schulz.

Junyi’s research explores the nature and developmental origins of creative thought, with recent work focusing on play. She designs behavioral experiments to study how people explore and reason in novel situations, and integrates psychological and computational theories to understand when and why thinking is fun.

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Nicole Coates received her BA in Cognitive Neuroscience from UC Davis and her MS in Psychology and Philosophy from San Jose State University. She is broadly interested in how children learn. More specifically, she is interested in how children come to learn abstract structure(s), why some structures are easier to learn than others, and our ability to spontaneously create structure in the world.

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Shengyi Wu is a PhD student in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley in May 2020, where she studied Psychology and Data Science. Prior to joining MIT, Shengyi worked as a project manager in the Computation and Language lab and the Kidd lab at UC Berkeley. Shengyi is broadly interested in using behavioral and computational approaches to study children’s social learning and attention.

Izabelė Jonušaitė is a PhD student at the Early Childhood Cognition Lab (PI: Laura Schulz) and the Computation Cognitive Science group (PI: Josh Tenenbaum). She is interested in combining computational and experimental approaches to study causal reasoning in naturalistic settings and how this capacity develops in children.

Prior to MIT, Izabelė was a Postgraduate Research Fellow at the Computation, Cognition and Development Lab at Harvard University (PI: Tomer Ullman) where she investigated people’s intuitive explanations in the domain of intuitive sociology. She received an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), and a BA in Philosophy from the University of York (United Kingdom).

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Kiera Parece is a graduate student in the ECCL at MIT. She was previously a post-baccalaureate Research Assistant working concurrently in the ECCL and the Computational Cognitive Development Lab at Harvard with Dr. Tomer Ullman. Kiera graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Psychology and Political Science. Prior to joining the ECCL, Kiera worked as a lab manager at Swarthmore College and as a preschool teacher and museum educator. Kiera is broadly interested in children’s social cognition and the role social influences play in children’s learning.

Lia Washington is a post-baccalaureate research scholar. She earned her B.A. in Psychology from New York University with minors in Computer Science and Korean language. At New York University she was a research assistant in another experimental developmental lab. Her primary interests lie in multilingualism and language acquisition, specifically, how learned languages and learning languages can affect how individuals understand and navigate the world.

Sienna Radifera is a Technical Associate in the ECCL MIT as of summer of 2025. She originally started as the lab manager in 2022. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Computer Science with a focus in Data Science through Johns Hopkins University. She previously received her BA in Psychology from Boston University. There, she grew an interest for computer science and statistics. She is passionate about psychology related research, data science, and growing her programming skills.

Asmita Mittal is an undergraduate student at Cornell University and has been working with the ECCL since high school. She is pursuing a BS in Human Development on a pre-medical track, alongside a Biomedical Engineering minor. Asmita is passionate about research regarding children’s play, persistence, and decision making. She is increasingly fascinated by the origins of children’s early understanding of the world and believes that curiosity should be infinite. As Asmita continues down this exciting path, she is eager to not only learn, but also uncover new aspects of human cognition along the way.

Isaiah Dela Cruz is the Lab Manager at MIT’s Early Childhood Cognition Lab (ECCL) as of August 2025. He earned his Ed.M. in Human Development and Education, with a concentration in Early Childhood from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and his BSc in Psychology, minor in Data Science from De La Salle University (Philippines). His current research interests revolves around how children reason and circumnavigate challenges in achieving their goals (e.g., Asking for help from caregivers or peers, imagining other possibilities or pathways). He also asks: When and how social relationships (ex. parenting) impact children’s goal reasoning and agency?