Frank Keil
Professor Frank C. Keil (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1977) is the director of the Cognition and Development lab."At the most general level I am interested in how we come to make sense of the world around us. Much of this research involves asking how intuitive explanations and understandings emerge in development and how they are related to notions of cause, mechanism and agency. These relations are linked to broader questions of what concepts are, how they change with development and increasing expertise and how they are structured in adults.
One set of current studies is examining a level of explanatory insight that functions without knowledge of specific mechanisms and instead involves knowing what sorts of properties are causally potent in a domain and how they are likely to interact. These patterns vary considerably across large scale domains of phenomena such as living kinds vs. artifacts) and a partial understanding of these patterns emerges very early in development and guides learning of more detailed domain specific beliefs. Other studies are examining constraints on preferences for some explanations over others even when there is little or no specific knowledge of the phenomena under explanation.
We are also asking how emerging knowledge of concrete mechanisms can link up frequency based information with abstract explanatory principles as well as cause distortions in judgment. A key part of developing such understandings also involves learning how knowledge is clustered and distributed in the minds others and how best to access that knowledge. We are exploring dramatic developmental and individual differences in how the social distribution of knowledge is understood. Finally, there is a longstanding interest in links between conceptual and semantic development and how the emergence of language interacts with conceptual structure."
Dr. Keil can be contacted here. You can also read Frank's CV.
Kristi Lockhart
Kristi Lockhart is an associate research scientist and lecturer at Yale University. She received her graduate degrees from Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania. A licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Lockhart specializes in working with children and families, with a specific interest in depression and other severe mental disorders. Her research focuses on children's social-cognitive development, specifically children's understanding of social convention and their beliefs about the origins and stability of traits. More recently, she has been investigating children's understanding of cheating. She can be contacted here.Lab Members
Current Graduate Students
Alex Shaw "My interests lie in using cognitive, social and developmental psychology to understand and generate ultimate evolutionary explanations for behavior. My research in the Cognition and Development lab focuses on what young children understand about the functional relationship between tools and goals. I am broadly interested in reputation and signaling, specifically in the areas of Morality, Third Party Punishment, Gossip, Humor, Intellectual Property and Love." Alex can be reached here.
Mark Sheskin "My research interests are at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. In other labs, I work with kids and monkeys to determine the foundation of adult human moral reasoning. In the Cognition and Development lab, my studies have focused on naive adult understanding of both moral and non-moral (e.g. biological) domains." His website can be found here and he can be reached here.
Benjamin Rottman
"I am primarily interested in causal reasoning. In humans, I am currently studying how people learn complex interactions between multiple causes (e.g., tolerance to coffee over time). I am starting to investigate whether monkeys have similar causal reasoning capacities as humans, for example, whether monkeys infer an unobserved cause to explain an unexpected event." Ben can be reached here.
Brent StricklandBrent wants to know what thoughts are made of. He thinks that the most basic units of cognition are revealed in a fascinating variety of ways: through the behavior of young infants, the semantics of natural language, and performance of the visual system. He is currently studying event perception and cognition, suspecting that event types might constitute one such basic unit. He can be reached here.
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Andrew GeierDr. Andrew B. Geier graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 2003 with a BA in psychology, he then entered a doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Working primarily with Professor Paul Rozin as his advisor, Andrew's research in graduate school was largely devoted to the study of human eating behavior in normative subjects. Clinically, Andrew specialized in applying Cognitive Therapy to depression and disordered eating. Following graduate school, in 2008, Andrew entered a yearlong clinical internship at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital that was primarily focused on the treatment and research of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders.
Andrew is interested in the ecology of eating, the judgment and decision making surrounding food choice, the cross-cultural study of body image, the stigma associated with obesity, weight loss and disordered eating interventions, the effect of differing emotional states on caloric consumption, the importance of the patient's epistemology in the treatment of psychopathology, and current statistical methodology.
Unit Bias, a term coined by both Andrew and Professor Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, became a productive line of research generating a number of studies and publications that investigate the effect of portion size on caloric intake. Differing segments of this research sparked interest within the areas of experimental psychology, business marketing, nutrition, and behavioral economics and Unit Bias has since been included in textbooks and covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Good Morning America, and numerous other news agencies.
Andrew's multi-year study of adolescent obesity in the Philadelphia public school system culminated in the discovery that body mass index (BMI) was the primary predictor of absenteeism in a cohort of approximately 1,200 students. This work lead to Andrew's involvement with the United States Department of Education in Washington, DC, where he worked with President George W. Bush's Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, on an advisory panel examining possible obesity interventions in the nation's school system.
In joining Professor Frank Keil's laboratory as a post-doc in the Psychology Department of Yale University, Andrew looks forward to incorporating and applying cognitive methodology in the furthering of his research into the environment's role in influencing human food choice. His website can be found here and he can be contacted here.
George Newman"I am generally interested in the nature of people's intuitive theories - particularly their theories about situations or domains in which the causal mechanisms are fuzzy and perhaps even a bit 'magical' such as authenticity, essentialism, art, superstitious reasoning, and moral reasoning." His website can be found here and he can be reached here.
Lab Manager
Jonathan Kominsky is the current lab manager for the C&D lab. He started in Summer 2009, following his graduation from Reed College with a B.A. in Psychology. He can be reached here.Research Assistants
Michael PacerEmily Casaretto
Jonathan Lassonde
Samuel Tepper
Summer 2009 Research Assistants
Christopher Adalio, University of Florida
Emily Casaretto, Yale University
Sara Fechtelkotter, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Rachel Romeo, University of Pennsylvania
Scott Snyder, Yale University
Samuel Tepper, Yale University
Anna Zamm, Indiana University, Bloomington
Former Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows
Dr. Russ Burnett
Dr. Caroline Proctor
Dr. Katherine Choe
Dr. Judith Danovitch
Dr. Marissa Greif
Dr. Nancy Kim
Dr. Derek Lyons
Dr. Donna Lutz
Dr. Candace Mills
Dr. George Newman
Dr. Nicholas Noles
Dr. Leon Rozenblit
Dr. Deena Skolnick Weisberg