People
Karen Adolph (Advisory Board) is Professor of Psychology, Applied Psychology, and Neural Science at New York University. Dr. Adolph is an expert in perceptual-motor development. She studies how infants learn to adapt their actions to changes in their bodies and variations in the environment. Dr. Adolph developed state-of-the-art technologies to record behavior, and she developed and maintains the Datavyu tool to code behavior from video. Dr. Adolph is the director of Databrary, a web-based library for research videos and a platform to support open data sharing. In addition, Dr. Adolph is Lead Investigator on the PLAY Project, a NIH-funded collaborative research initiative with 65 researchers from 45 universities across the United States and Canada. Dr. Adolph will provide expertise specifically related to (a) the evaluation and selection of fieldsites, (b) the establishment and maintenance of international research collaborations, and (c) the development and housing of datasets and research materials in Databrary to enable open sharing.
Tamer Amin (Fieldsite PI) earned his MA and PhD in Developmental Psychology from Clark University, USA. He is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Education and member of the Science and Mathematics Education Center at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. His research focuses on conceptual change in science learning. He has a particular interest in integrating ideas from a number of different disciplinary perspectives on conceptual change, as reflected in his co-edited book (with Olivia Levrini) Converging Perspectives on Conceptual Change: Mapping an Emerging Paradigm in the Learning Sciences (Routledge, 2018). In a parallel line of research, he is investigating the challenges of teaching and learning science in the multilingual contexts of the Arab world and how these challenges might be overcome.
Florencia Anggoro (Fieldsite PI) is a Professor of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross. She completed her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology (with a specialization in cognitive science) from Northwestern University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on conceptual development, particularly the role of language, culture, and formal and informal learning experiences in shaping children’s and adults’ concepts. Her research has been published in various journals including Psychological Science and Child Development, and supported by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences. Her recent work has focused on designing and testing cognitive supports for children’s science learning.
Elizabeth Bonawitz (Fieldsite PI) is the David J. Vitale Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Harvard University. Her work focuses on the basic science theories of learning with the broader goal of informing educational practice. Her research bridges two research traditions: cognitive development and computational modeling. Specifically, Bonawitz’s empirical approach focus on the structure of children's early causal beliefs, how evidence and prior beliefs interact to affect children's learning, the developmental processes that influence children's belief revision and curiosity, and the role of social factors (such as learning from others) in guiding learning. Bonawitz received her Ph.D. from MIT in the brain in cognitive sciences in 2009 working with Dr. Laura Schulz. She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at University of California, Berkeley with Thomas Griffiths and Alison Gopnik (2009-2013). She was an assistant and associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, Newark from 2013 until 2020 when she moved to Harvard.
Emily Burdett (Fieldsite PI) completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2013. She is Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham and a research associate post with the University of Oxford. Her work explores various aspects of 'culture'; these include the development and spread of skills, tool use, morals, norms, and supernatural ideas. Her work uses an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and experimental approach. She has published numerous studies regarding children’s developing understanding of supernatural agent concepts and many of these have involved cross-cultural studies in locations such as Israel, Albania, Kenya, and the Dominican Republic.
Maureen Callanan (Advisory Board) is a Professor of Psychology at University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Callanan is an expert in cross-cultural social cognitive development. Her research focuses on cognitive and language development in preschool children, exploring how children come to understand the world through everyday conversations with parents. Dr. Callanan will provide expertise specifically on (a) ensuring measures are valid within specific cultural settings, as well as able to be compared across cultural contexts and (b) naturalistic observations of socialization practices.
Eva E. Chen (Fieldsite PI) received an Ed.D. in Human Development and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as a B.A. with Honors and Distinction in Psychology from Stanford University. She served as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at The University of Hong Kong before moving to The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she was an Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science. Dr. Chen is now an Associate Professor in the College of Education at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Dr. Chen's research interests center around the social cognitive developmental processes of young children across different social backgrounds, and she has worked closely with kindergartens in the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.
Jana Chokor (Research Assistant) holds a BA in psychology from the American University of Beirut. She has experience working on the Lebanese suicide hotline. She is currently a mental health case officer in the Lebanese National Mental Health Program in the Ministry of Public Health. She is also a WHO Quality Rights assessor of inpatient and outpatient mental health services. Besides her clinical experience, Jana is interested in cognitive psychology. She has been a research assistant on the DBN-Lebanon team since March 2022.
John Coley (Fieldsite PI) conducts research addressing fundamental questions in cognitive science, framed by the view that humans possess powerful intuitive frameworks for understanding important domains of experience. These intuitive frameworks—arising through an interaction of evolved cognitive structures, personal experience, and culture—provide us with fast and efficient, but ultimately fallible, guidelines for dealing with complexity. In his Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education Laboratory (CORE Lab) at Northeastern University, Dr. Coley investigates how people organize their informal, intuitive knowledge about the world; how they use that knowledge in reasoning, explaining, understanding, and learning; how these processes develop through childhood; and how they change with experience and context.
Kathleen Corriveau (Lead PI and Fieldsite PI) is a Full Professor of applied human development at Boston University and the director of the Social Learning Lab. Her research focuses on social and cognitive development in childhood, with a specific focus on how children decide what people and what information are trustworthy sources. She has established field sites in multiple countries, including China, Hong Kong, Iran and Turkey. She has a strong commitment for focusing on within-culture individual differences based on family socioeconomic status and religiosity. Dr. Corriveau's research has been widely published in a number of high-impact journals, including Psychological Science, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Cognition. Her work on the role of religious exposure in children’s reality status judgments received national media attention, with media coverage from New York Daily News, USA Today, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Reader, The Week UK, Religion News Service, World Religion News, Philosophy News, Slate, Swedish Radio, The Economist, and CBC Radio. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (including a 7 PI Collaborative Research Grant), the Templeton Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association. Dr. Corriveau has received several awards, including being named a current Fellow and former Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, and the Early Career Impact Award from the Foundation of Associations of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and holds a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation​. Maliki Ghossainy (Senior Research Scientist), Kirsten Lesage (Postdoctoral Research Associate), & Kelly Cui (graduate research associate) are also part of this team.
Kelly Cui (DBN Alumnus) was a graduate research associate for the Developing Belief Network based out of Boston University. She is broadly interested in how children learn from and interact with other people, and how socio-cultural context influences this process. She has done studies exploring the role of religious and cultural background on children’s understanding of reality and possibility. Personal website: www.bu.edu/wheelock/profile/kelly-yixin-cui
Audun Dahl-Aaberg (Fieldsite PI) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work centers on the development of concerns with right and wrong from infancy to adulthood. Using behavioral experiments, naturalistic observations, structured interviews, and surveys, his lab has examined the development of helping and harming through everyday interactions in infancy; judgments and reasoning based on moral and other concerns among preschoolers; reasoning about religious norms among adolescents and adults; and decisions about academic integrity and cheating from high school to college. He has published articles in the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Psychological Science, Child Development, and Developmental Science and has received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Jocelyn Dautel (Fieldsite PI) is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Psychology at Queen's University Belfast. Dr. Dautel studies how children navigate their social worlds, especially when they are divided. Using methods from cognitive and social development, she investigates when, and how, social and cultural contexts influence social cognition, with a focus on the development of non-visible social categories (e.g. language, religion, nationality). Her research finds that variation in children’s cultural and historical context, exposure to diversity, family socialization, and perceptions of intergroup conflict, can all influence social and moral cognition and behavior. Dr. Dautel has published comparative research with samples from Croatia, Kosovo, Ireland, Israel, Northern Ireland, the Republic of North Macedonia, South Korea, and the USA, contributing to debates about unique and universal processes in the development of social cognition and intergroup behaviors.
Elizabeth Davis (Fieldsite PI) is an Associate Professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on understanding how emotion regulation relates to adaptive outcomes (e.g., learning) and maladaptive outcomes (e.g., anxiety) in childhood, with a focus on identifying regulatory strategies that children can use to effectively alleviate negative emotion. She also aims to identify individual differences in children’s biology and social experiences that determine whether they can regulate emotion effectively, as well as mechanisms responsible for effective emotion regulation (e.g., attentional focus).
Helen Elizabeth Davis (Fieldsite PI) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a research scientist in the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the evolution of childhood, social learning, and cognition across the lifecourse. Davis received her PhD from the University of New Mexico in Evolutionary Anthropology in 2015. Utilizing natural experiments, Davis has worked with Tsimané people of Bolivia for over 10 years in collaboration with the Tsimané Health and Life History Project. In 2017, she established a fieldsite in northern Namibia and southern Angola, among the OvaTwa and Himba peoples, in collaboration with Profs. Joe Henrich, Michael Muthukrishna, and Elizabeth Cashdan. Davis is also the cofounder and current president of One Pencil Project, a 501(c)(3) education and disaster relief nonprofit.
Adine DeLeon (Graduate Researcher) is currently pursuing her doctorate in applied human development at Boston University within the Wheelock College of Education. She is interested in the conceptual evolution of supernatural entities across diverse cultural contexts.
Gil Diesendruck (Fieldsite PI) is a Full Professor at the Department of Psychology, Director of the Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory at the Gonda Brain Research Center, and currently Head of the Interdisciplinary Unit, all at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His research – focusing on children's cultural learning and social categorization – has been funded by the Israel Science Foundation, German-Israel Foundation, and Volkswagen Foundation, and has been published in leading journals in Psychology. He has been an Associate Editor of the journal Child Development, and is currently Associate Editor in the Annual Reviews of Developmental Psychology and Journal of Cognition and Development.
Denise Evans (Fieldsite PI) is a Principal Researcher at the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HE2RO), a division of the Wits Health Consortium, with more than 13 years of research experience focused on optimizing HIV, TB, and drug-resistant TB treatment outcomes. She has a joint position in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand as an Associate Professor. She is currently the technical lead of the Tuberculosis research area at HE2RO and has an interest in community-based interventions to address the health needs of people in under-resourced communities.
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Aidan Feeney (Fieldsite PI) is a Professor of Psychology at Queen's University Belfast. Dr. Feeney conducts research on thinking and reasoning broadly defined and he has pursued a variety of lines of research relating to how children and adults’ knowledge and beliefs about the world impacts on their deductive and category-based inductive reasoning. He also has interests in the roles of experience and educational environment on essentialist and other intuitions about religion and national categories. This work has had both developmental and cross-cultural dimensions. In parallel with this theoretically-motivated work Dr. Feeney is increasingly motivated to carry out work which has real world impacts and has developed partnerships with local organisations to pursue this agenda.
Stephanie Farah (Research Assistant) earned her MA in psychology from Boston University. Alongside her work as a research assistant with the DBN-Lebanon team, she is currently a part-time instructor of psychology at the Lebanese American University. She is interested in cultural influences on caregiving and the relationships between childhood adversity, stress regulation, and health and relational outcomes.
Frankie Fong (Fieldsite PI) is a Lecturer of Developmental Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a Guest Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. He is interested in children’s social cognitive development, with a particular focus on children’s imitative behavior and normative understanding across diverse social learning contexts and cultural landscapes. In addition to his research in Germany and Australia, he has established, conducted and coordinated research with families across urban and Indigenous communities in Malaysia.
Julia Ganama (Research Assistant) earned her BA in psychology, with a minor in philosophy, in 2019 from the Lebanese American University. She has worked on a variety of research projects in both local non-governmental organizations and academic settings. Her research interests include understanding the effects of our cognitive processes on our perceptions of, and interactions with, the world. She is currently working on reviewing and indigenizing psychology in the Arab world, promoting relevant and open psychology resources for individuals in the Arab world, as well as working as a research assistant on the DBN-Lebanon team.
Maliki E. Ghossainy (DBN Associate Project Director and Fieldsite PI) completed her PhD in developmental psychology and her MS in statistics from The University of Texas at Austin in 2016. She studies the ways that children demonstrate early signs of epistemic vigilance, that is, the ability to selectively prefer some informants as good sources and judiciously avoid some informants as bad sources. Her research is particularly focused on the ways in which children rely on nonverbal or implicit cues to infer credibility. She has found evidence of a dramatic change between ages 5 and 6 in children’s use of nonverbal leakage to infer that a speaker may be lying and is currently investigating the underlying mechanisms that may explain these findings. She is also currently studying the role of linguistic behaviors on the epistemic judgements of bilingual children in Lebanon and the USA. In addition to serving as co-PI for this research team, she is the Associate Project Director for the Developing Belief Network, and is currently based at Boston University.
Nicholas Gibson (ResearchWell and Advisory Board) provides advisory and consulting services on research design, strategy and program development, open science, data stewardship, and the scientific study of religion and spirituality. Trained in psychology, physiology, and religion at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge, he subsequently held positions at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity and Department of Social and Developmental Psychology. Over 12 years at the John Templeton Foundation he stewarded more than $180 million in grant initiatives across the social, behavioral, cognitive, and health sciences, often involving capacity-building efforts for interdisciplinary and international research collaboration. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
Rick Gilmore (Advisory Board) is Professor of Psychology and a Huck Institute of the Life Sciences Faculty Co-fund. He is an expert in the development of perception, action and memory. He is also the co-founder and co-director, along with Dr. Adolph, of the Databrary.org data library and Datavyu video coding tool. In addition, Dr. Gilmore is active in thinking about best practices in Open Science through his involvement of the Society for Research in Child Development’s Task Force on Scientific Integrity and Openness and through scholarly papers and presentations. Dr. Gilmore will provide expertise specifically on (a) the development of data sets in Databrary that can be shared openly and (b) ensuring the Developing Belief Network follows FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship.
Michael Gurven (Fieldsite PI) received his PhD in 2000 in Human Evolutionary Ecology at the University of New Mexico. His research group studies how ecological and social factors shape behavior, physiology, health and psychology. Incorporating insights and perspectives from both the life and social sciences provides a unique research environment for explaining human diversity. He has conducted fieldwork with South American indigenous populations for over two decades, and has published over 200 articles that take an evolutionary perspective on behavior, health, physiology and psychology. He is Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Integrative Anthropological Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara, co-Director of the Tsimane Health and Life History Project, and Area Director of Biodemography and Evolution at UCSB.
Paul L. Harris (Advisory Board) is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education at Harvard University. He is an expert in social and cognitive development. He is the author of 7 books, the most recent of which focuses on children’s selective learning from others as a source of information. Dr. Harris has received numerous awards including named Fellow of the British Academy, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Harris will provide expertise specifically on (a) the establishment and maintenance of international research collaborations, (b) the selection of measures that appropriately target the research questions, and (c) the measurement of verbal, textual, and non-verbal testimony.
Benjamin Jee (Fieldsite PI) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Worcester State University. He completed his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence Learning Center at Northwestern University. He studies knowledge acquisition, with particular interest in and science learning. His research has been published in various journals including Psychological Science and Memory and Cognition, and supported by the Institute of Education Sciences. His recent work has explored ways in which cognitive processes, such as analogy, can be leveraged to support children’s understanding of complex scientific ideas.
Deborah Kelemen (Advisory Board) is a Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Boston University. Dr. Kelemen is an expert in conceptual development, with particular expertise in concepts of the artificial and natural world, conceptual constraints on intuitive, religious, and scientific theory-formation, object categorization, social learning, social cognition, moral cognition, cultural and individual differences in cognition, conceptual change, and early science education. Dr. Kelemen has a history of funding through competitions and cross-cultural networks supported by The John Templeton Foundation and will provide feedback based on that experience. Dr. Kelemen will provide expertise specifically on (a) the establishment and maintenance of international research collaborations, (b) the selection of measures that appropriately target the research questions, and (c) the measurement of implicit/intuitive cognitions.
Praveen Kenderla (Postdoctoral Research Associate) is based at the University of California, Riverside. Praveen completed his Ph.D. in psychology at Boston University Psychology and Brain Sciences department with a focus on Developmental Science. Praveen studies the development of executive functions and cognitive systems that contribute to the development of social categorization and its consequences in different social contexts and cultures.
Jonathan Kominsky (Postdoc Award) is an assistant professor in the Cognitive Science department at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. He studies the development of beliefs about cause and effect. He is also involved in the development of open-source tools for research, including a new app that provides activities for parents and children to do together and records their conversation during the activity, to gain insight into how parents might shape their children's beliefs in informal environments.
Hannah Kramer (Postdoc) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Kramer is also associated with Queen's University Belfast and Boston University. She is broadly interested in how children and adults think about people. In particular, Dr. Kramer studies the development of thinking about minds, emotion, time, and social groups. As part of the Developing Belief Network, Dr. Kramer is bridging these long-standing interests with the development of religious concepts to understand how children form beliefs about their own and other people's religious identities.
Tamar Kushnir (Fieldsite PI) is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and the director of the Early Childhood Cognition Laboratory and co-director of the Cognitive Science Program. She received her M.A. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and was previously on the faculty in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. Kushnir's research examines learning and conceptual change in young children with a focus on social learning and social cognition. Her work is motivated by a long-standing curiosity about the developing mind, and in particular by how children learn about themselves and others from actively exploring the world around them. Research topics include: mechanisms of causal learning, the developmental origins of our beliefs in free will and agency, cultural influences on early social and moral beliefs, normative reasoning, epistemic trust, and the role of imagination in social cognition, motivation and decision making.
Natassa Kyriakopoulou (Fieldsite PI) is Laboratory and Teaching Personnel at the School of Education, Department of Early Childhood Education at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research area is conceptual change, and she has primarily studied children’s scientific reasoning as they acquire science concepts and the challenges they encounter during conceptual change. In addition, she has investigated the impact of children's epistemic cognition on conceptual change and social cognition's role in conceptual development. She has also developed educational interventions to foster children's scientific reasoning and enhance their epistemic and social cognition. More recently, her work has widened to encompass pre-service teachers’ beliefs about learning, teaching, and self-regulation alongside their epistemic beliefs. She has participated in a cross-cultural research program, where the validity of a tool for exploring educators' beliefs about learning, teaching, and self-regulated learning was examined in several countries (e.g., Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Poland). This instrument has been used to investigate how educators’ belief systems impact educational practice.
Hea Jung Lee (Graduate Researcher) is a is a fifth-year graduate student in the Developmental area of the Psychology Department at UCR. Her research interests include how imagination and fantasy belief may influence children’s understanding of social relationships. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Wellesley College.
Kirsten Lesage (DBN Alumnus) was a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Developing Belief Network from 2020 to 2022 and was based out of Boston University. She completed her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of California, Riverside in 2020. Kirsten’s research interests focused on (1) the cultural evolution of how causal explanatory systems are transmitted (e.g., language, testimony, social learning, and rituals), (2) the emergence of explanatory worldviews in early childhood, and (3) the role of the sociocultural context in the development of religious cognition and supernatural beliefs (e.g., concepts of God, prayer, supernatural causality). Personal website: www.kirstenlesage.com
Pearl Han Li (Postdoc) received her B.A. from Peking University, Ed.M. from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she is currently a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, working with Dr. Melissa Koenig. Pearl’s research interests focus on (1) the different ways in which testimony can affect children’s moral decision making; (2) the interpersonal and collaborative aspects of children’s testimonial learning; and (3) the social and cultural mechanisms that make children either too resistant, or too credulous to trust adult testimony, especially when children face claims that contradict their own intuitions and prior knowledge. Currently, her postdoctoral fellowship project focuses on the role of testimony in children’s acquisition of moral knowledge. In two cross-cultural studies conducted in the United States and China, Pearl’s dissertation project explores (1) which types of testimony are most powerful in moving children’s moral judgments; (2) how children balance independent thinking and reliance on testimony when acquiring moral and empirical knowledge, and (3) how parental and cultural values contribute to children’s moral agency and moral learning.
Ashley Marin (Graduate Researcher) is a third year graduate student researcher at the Childhood Cognition Lab at the University of California, Riverside, working with Dr. Richert. Her research focuses on how children learn to participate in the culturally salient social conventions around them and the consequential role that such engagement plays in shaping children's identity and religious cognition.
Katherine McAuliffe (Fieldsite PI) studies the forces that shape and sustain cooperative societies. Work in her lab—the Cooperation Lab at Boston College—combines approaches from psychology, anthropology and evolutionary biology to address big questions about the origins of cooperation. For instance, how do children acquire norms of cooperation across societies, when do they begin to comply with these norms and when do they begin to enforce them in others? She believes that a better understanding of the psychology that underlies cooperative norms can allow us to harness the power of those norms, to promote cooperation in children and adults alike.
Abigail McLaughlin (Postdoc) is a third-year PhD student at Boston College, where she works with Dr. Katie McAuliffe in the Cooperation Lab. Abby's research focuses on children's emerging beliefs about religious groups and agents, as well as how these beliefs influence their social behavior. She is also interested in children's responses to interpersonal transgressions, and in particular their evaluations of and engagement in forgiveness-related behaviors. By leveraging both of these fields of study, she hopes to explore how religious beliefs relate to conceptions of justice and intervention behaviors.
Carole Meyer-Rieth (Research Administrator) is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles (BA, Psychology) with over twenty years of professional experience in academic administrative support, event planning, graphic design, and project management. As a trustee of a private foundation since 2011, Carole is experienced in grants administration and has an ongoing role in local, national, and global philanthropy as a member of Southern California Grantmakers and the Council on Foundations. She is also an events planner with experience in statistical reporting and graphic/web design.. Carole is based out of the University of California, Riverside.
Shaun Nichols (Fieldsite PI) is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He works at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, and his research concerns the psychological underpinnings of philosophical thought. He is the author of Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility, and Rational Rules: Towards a Theory of Moral Learning, and he has published over 100 articles in academic journals in philosophy and psychology.
Ageliki Nicolopoulou (Fieldsite PI) is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Lehigh University. She was born and raised in Greece and came to the US for her education, receiving her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of California--Berkeley. She has taught at the University of California- San Diego, Smith College, and Lehigh University. She is a sociocultural developmental psychologist whose research interests include the role of narrative in development, socialization, and education; and the influence of the peer group and peer culture as social contexts for children's language, literacy, cognitive, and socio-emotional development. She has taught courses in cross-cultural developmental psychology emphasizing how language and language interactions play a crucial role in shaping children’s identity and academic status.
Mark Nielsen (Fieldsite PI) is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Queensland and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He is the Inaugural Specialty Chief Editor of Development in Infancy (specialty section of Frontiers in Developmental Psychology) and a long-standing Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. He has published over 130 papers that reflect his interest in the evolution and development of human social cognition. His paper on the WEIRD bias in developmental psychology is the most cited of all published in JECP in the last decade.
Jenny Nissel (Postdoctoral Research Associate) is based at Boston University. She earned a B.A. from Yale University in psychology and theater (2009), and a Ph.D. from UT Austin in developmental psychology (2023). She studies the development of the imagination, with a particular interest in how children across cultures think about possibility, religion, and fiction.
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Ayse Payir (DBN Alumnus) was the DBN's Senior Postdoctoral Researcher while based at the Social Learning Lab at Boston University, working with Kathleen Corriveau and Paul L. Harris (Harvard University). Her research focuses on the interplay between culture and the development of cognition, emotion, and morality from childhood to adulthood. She explores how children imagine alternatives to reality, use these alternatives to make inferences about others’ emotions, and make moral judgments. She also investigates how sociocultural factors—such as religious status—impact the boundaries of these alternatives. Previously she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Social and Moral Cognition Lab at Columbia University. For more information about Ayse and her research, please visit her personal website: https://aysepayir.wixsite.com/ayse
Boli Reyes-Jaquez (DBN Alumnus) is now an Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire, and director of the Social Cognition Development lab (https://socialcognitiondev.com/). He studies human development, with a focus on how cognitive, social, and cultural factors influence two fundamental domains of social evaluation: competence and morality. Before joining the Psychology department at UNH, he obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. After spending the next two years teaching in the Dominican Republic as a Fulbright Fellow, he returned to the U.S. as a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Minnesota, and then joined the DBN team as a Postdoctoral Associate at University of California, Riverside. Current DBN-related interests include testing whether as a starting point in life, concepts like moral fallibility (e.g., misusing one’s authority/powers) are deemed to be uniquely human, or also applicable to supernatural agents.
Rebekah Richert (Lead PI and Fieldsite PI) is one of the primary investigators on the Developing Belief Network, as well as the PI leading this research team. Dr. Richert is a full professor of psychology and the director of the Childhood Cognition Lab at the University of California, Riverside. Based on her training in cognitive development, Dr. Richert has developed various lines of research into how children’s developing social cognition influences their understanding of religion, fantasy, and media. Her research team is nearly done with data collection from a JTF-funded, 6-wave longitudinal study of the development of religious cognitions in early childhood in children from various religious background. Her research has been published in top journals in developmental psychology, including Child Development, Cognitive Development, Developmental Psychology, and the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, as well as journals specifically devoted to the psychology of religion, including Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion and the Journal of Cognition & Culture. Dr. Richert’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (including as PI of a 5-year Collaborative Research Grant), the Social Science Research Council, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Templeton World Chari
Peter Rockers (Fieldsite PI) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. His research focuses on evaluating early childhood interventions in low- and middle-income countries using experimental methods. He is involved in ongoing cluster-randomized trials in South Africa, Zambia, and Indonesia testing the effects of home- and community-based interventions on child neurodevelopment and related outcomes. Dr. Rockers received a Doctor of Science degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Laura Shneidman (Fieldsite PI) is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA, USA. She previously held professorial positions in the Psychology department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in the Interdisciplinary Program on Educational Policies and Practices (PIPE). Dr. Shneidman’s research focuses on early social learning in diverse social contexts. She has worked for over 10 years in Yucatec Mayan communities in Southeastern Mexico where she has used experimental and observational techniques in order to explore the relation between caregiver input and exploratory and observational learning in infancy and early childhood.
Mahesh Srinivasan (Fieldsite PI) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He directs the UC Berkeley Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory, which explores how linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities arise and interact during human development and across different cultures. Dr. Srinivasan’s work on social cognitive development has addressed topics including the development of social group concepts, normative development, and religious cognition. His work has been published in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Child Development, and Developmental Science, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
Irini Skopeliti (Fieldsite PI) is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Developmental Psychology in the Department of Educational Sciences and Early Childhood Education at the University of Patras (Greece) and a CO-PI of this team. Her research interests are at the intersection of cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology, focusing on cognitive development and learning processes, particularly conceptual change. Initially, she investigated students’ conceptual understanding of scientific concepts using tools adopted in cross-cultural developmental studies (e.g., Greece, Great Britain, Australia). She has also examined how students’ initial conceptual understanding changes during the process of learning and development and how using teaching tools can promote conceptual change. More recently, she has been engaged in cross-cultural research across several continents, investigating how teachers’ educational and epistemic belief systems influence their choices, designs, and implementation of educational practices.
Ghadir Soueidan (Graduate Researcher) earned her BA in translation and interpretation from the Lebanese International University and her MA in computational linguistics from the Lebanese University. She is currently a member of the DBN-Lebanon team. Her research interests focus on bilingual/multilingual practices and second language acquisition in Lebanon. She is also interested in the effect of these practices on language preferences and language use.
Joanna Stephens (Research Coordinator and Research Assistant) earned her MSc in Psychology from Nottingham Trent University and now works alongside Dr Emily Burdett at University of Nottingham coordinating the UK DBN data collection. She is interested in developmental psychology, integrity, and positive psychology in religion.
Megan Stutesman (Postdoc) is a postdoctoral research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. Stutesman is an applied developmental psychologist interested in social cognitive development. Broadly, her work focuses on how context influences development, and more specifically, her work examines how our universal human behavior of engaging with the arts impacts development. She primarily takes mixed-methods research approaches with community partner collaborations.
Jiayue Sun (Lab Coordinator) is a lab coordinator in the Childhood Cognition Lab at University of California, Riverside. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science from University of California, Santa Cruz.
Amanda Tarullo (Fieldsite PI) is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, where she is also Director of the Developmental Science Doctoral Program and a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Systems Neuroscience. Her research focuses on how sociocontextual factors shape the developing brain and biological stress systems, and on identifying neurodevelopmental mechanisms that link early life stress to child cognitive outcomes. She is an Associate Editor of Developmental Psychobiology and was named an Outstanding Early Career Psychologist by APA Division 52, International Psychology.
Laura Taylor (Fieldsite PI) is an Associate Professor in Psychology at University College Dublin. Dr. Taylor integrates peace studies with developmental and social psychology to study positive development and intergroup relations among children. She studies cross-cultural risk and resilience processes related to peacebuilding among children in divided societies, with a focus on family transmission of values and beliefs. Dr. Taylor has advanced quantitative training uses multiple methods (e.g., qualitative, experimental), and has developed and adapted cross-cultural measures for children and families. Her long-term goal is to develop programs to enable children and families to engage in positive social change. She has published collaborative research in Colombia, Croatia, Kosovo, Ireland, Israel, Republic of North Macedonia, and Northern Ireland.
Kara Weisman (Postdoctoral Project Director) studies intuitive theories and conceptual change, with a focus on folk philosophy of mind. Kara completed a B.A. in cognitive science at Yale University in 2009, and a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford University in 2019. From 2016-2020, she was one of the core researchers on the Mind and Spirit Project (funded by the Templeton Foundation, PI: T.M. Luhrmann), a long-term collaboration grounded in anthropology and psychology, which examined how understandings of the mind shape people’s spiritual experiences across diverse faiths and cultures. In her recent work, Kara has advocated for leveraging “bottom-up” statistical analyses to identify continuities and differences in concepts across groups of people, with particular attention to concepts of mental life among adults and 4- to 12-year-old children in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu. She is based out of the University of California, Riverside, but lives in the Greater Boston area. Personal website: kgweisman.github.io
Allison J. Williams-Gant (Postdoctoral Research Associate) is based at Boston University. Her research interests focus on how children identify who (or what) is a good source of information and how this preference might change depending on the domain (e.g., religious vs scientific). Her most recent work examined how accuracy and expertise influence children’s judgements of a source’s knowledge and how these judgements influence children's preferences for future learning. She completed her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a specialization in Development, at the University of Louisville in Spring 2022 and joined the Developing Belief Network as a Postdoctoral Research Associate the following summer.
Jacqueline D. Woolley (Advisory Board) is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Woolley is an expert in children’s cognitive and conceptual development. Her research addresses children’s ability to make reality status judgments and both individual and developmental differences in religious cognition. Dr. Woolley will provide expertise specifically on (a) children’s conceptual development, (b) children’s religious cognition, and (c) the selection of measures to be used in addressing questions in these domains.
Jingyi Xu (Graduate Researcher) is a doctoral student in the Social Learning Lab at Boston University. She has a B.A. from Boston College in Applied Psychology & Human Development and Economics (2021), and an Ed.M. in Applied Human Development from Harvard Graduate School of Education (2022). Her research interests revolve around the interaction between culture and social cognitive development. She is interested in studying religious cognition and moral reasoning.
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Yian Xu (Postdoctoral Award) (Conceptual Development and Social Cognition Lab, New York University). Yian received her B.A. in French literature from Peking University, Ed.M. in human development and psychology from Harvard University, and completed her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the role of culture, language, and experience in shaping how children and adults make sense of the world, especially between western and east Asian societies. Currently, her postdoctoral fellowship project aims to reveal how psychological essentialism—an intuitive framework for understanding the structure of the biological and social world—is associated with children’s early acquisition and development of religious beliefs across cultural contexts.
Haleh Yazdi (Postdoctoral Award) Haleh is based at the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, and was awarded her M.Sc. from the University of Oxford. Her research takes a cross-cultural approach to examining how children form group biases, moral beliefs, and notions of fairness and justice in the world. She has conducted studies in Canada, India, Iran, Mexico, and the U.S. to see how resource availability, cultural cohesion, and social stability affect children’s social cognition. A primary goal of Haleh's work is to understand the role that cultural input plays in shaping prosocial behaviors, such as cooperation and trust, with the larger aim to improve group relations globally.
Nina Ye (Graduate Researcher) is a graduate student at the Social Learning Lab at Boston University, working with Kathleen Corriveau. She is interested in studying how children acquire knowledge, including whom they choose to learn from and what strategies they use for learning.
Meltem Yucel (Postdoctoral Fellow) is funded by the NIH (NRSA; F32) at Duke University's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. She received her Ph.D. in psychology with a secondary concentration in quantitative psychology at the University of Virginia in 2021. She is interested in the development of social cognition and morality. Using behavioral, eye-tracking, pupillometry, and social network analysis methods, Dr. Yucel investigates how people, both young and old, make sense of different norms and those who violate them. ​
Yue Yu (Fieldsite PI) is an Education Research Scientist in the Centre for Research in Child Development and the Centre for Character and Citizenship Education, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Using experimental, observational and computational methods, Yue studies social learning and social cognition in early childhood, especially how early learning is shaped by the social context in which it takes place. His current research topics include pedagogical questioning, imitation, and children’s understanding of choice. His ultimate goal is to 1) address the theoretical question of why humans are uniquely efficient in accumulating knowledge, and 2) inform parents and educators about ways to facilitate children’s learning in formal and informal educational settings.
Xin (Alice) Zhao (Fieldsite PI) is an Assistant Professor in the Department Educational Psychology, and the director of the Culture and Child Development Laboratory at East China Normal University. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University. Dr. Zhao’s research examines young children’s social cognitive development across cultures. Her research focuses on children’s developing beliefs about free will, choice and norm, as well as the implications of these beliefs on children’s behavioral regulation and social evaluation. She also examines the role of social and cultural contexts in children’s developing social cognition. Her research has been published in Child Development, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Cognitive Development, etc.