Social Learning Lab

Hyowon Gweon

CV | Bio | hyo [at] stanford.edu

I'm broadly interested in understanding the human ability to communicate – in particular, how we learn from others and teach others. My research brings together various approaches, aiming to provide a unified description of the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie the representations and inferential processes that allow us to learn and share about the world. As the PI of the Social Learning Lab, I'm thrilled to explore these questions with amazing people who all love to "learn from one another”!

Aneesa Conine-Nakano

I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2022 with a B.A. in Psychology. My past research projects have focused on how language and cognitive processes in childhood interplay with the development of stereotypes. Currently, I am interested how children use cues, such as emotion and language, to make inferences about people and their environment.

Kat Adams Shannon

kat.adams [at] stanford.edu

Kat studies how young children adapt their attention and learning behaviors to best match different early environments, with particular focus on understanding variability and strengths in contexts of early adversity. A key aim of her research is to create and collaborate on innovative uses of technology and statistical methods to support education and developmental science.

Aaron Chuey

chuey [at] stanford.edu

Reasoning about knowledge is both a ubiquitous and necessary part of human life. Without much effort, we can estimate how much others know, determine how valuable knowledge is, and efficiently transmit and obtain it ourselves. I study the way children think about knowledge and information to better understand where these intuitions come from and what underlies them.

Peter Zhu

pgzhu [at] stanford.edu

Humans are active learners and teachers - we integrate information from our environment, reason over it, and transmit it to others. I am interested in the processes and representations that enable this ability and their foundations in development. I hope to use a wide variety of methods to uncover more about how both children and adults learn and reason about our social world.

Joseph Outa

joouta [at] stanford.edu

Both adults and children can reason flexibly about issues in the physical, social and moral domains. I’m curious about how this ability develops from childhood. What core concepts enable this process? Children make rich inferences over structured representations of the world. How do these inferential abilities unfold? Do children deploy similar or different mechanisms to reason across different domains? How do they develop into the complex moral and social beings that are adults.

Rachel Wang

yixingw [at] stanford.edu

I am a junior at Stanford studying Symbolic Systems with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence. I love to explore the patterns of human social and cognitive behaviors through innovative technologies. In the Social Learning Lab, I work on a VR platform to investigate the human perception of physics in the virtual world. I can't wait to witness how modern technology will contribute to cognitive science research in the future.

Libby Rouffy

erouffy [at] stanford.edu

I am a junior at Stanford majoring in Human Biology with a concentration in child development and social learning. I am interested in how children learn about themselves and the world in unique social environments. In the SLL, I hope to explore how kids behave as both learners and teachers when drawing social inferences and to value their curiosity.

Marielle Zheng

mxmzheng [at] stanford.edu

I am a sophomore at Stanford majoring in Psychology and minoring in Theatre and Performance Studies. I love exploring the human mind and our behaviours from a sociocultural and developmental perspective. Through SLL, I am able to further explore my interests by specifically honing in to see the multitude of factors that impact the way children develop and interact with one another.

Sophie Bridgers [Website]

Sophie was a PhD student in the lab, supported by NSF GRFP; she defended her dissertation in May 2020, titled Social reasoning in action: Social-cognitive mechanisms supporting prosocial decisions in early childhood.

She is now a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard (Tomer Ullman) and MIT (Laura Schulz).

Natalia Vélez [Website]

Natalia was a PhD student in the lab, supported by NSF GRFP and NIH F99/K00 D-SPAN Fellowship. She defended her dissertation in May 2020, titled Minds, groups, and populations : harnessing the latent structure of social information .

After her post-doc training at Harvard (Sam Gershman, Fiery Cushman), she will be joining Princeton (Dept of Psychology) as an incoming Assistant Professor in Summer 2023!

Mika Asaba [Website]

Mika was a PhD student in the lab, supported by NSF GRFP. She defended her dissertation in June 2021, titled Social learning and communication about the self .

She is now a post-doctoral researcher at Yale (Julia Leonard, Julian Jara-Ettinger).

Griffin Dietz

Griffin was a PhD student in the lab, supported by NSF GRFP. She defended her dissertation in May 2022, titled Cognitively appropriate and readily accessible computing education technology for young learners.

Yang Wu [Website]

Yang was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab, supported by NSF.

She is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.