After someone sees an object violate a basic physical expectation, what happens next in their representation of that object? 

One possibility is that they stop treating it as an object at all and stop forming predictions about it. Another is that they rapidly update their beliefs, so they actively expect it to continue to behave surprisingly. A third is that they continue to expect it to obey physical principles, but do not specify which principle was violated. A fourth is that they keep track of the specific violation, and use that record to guide what they attend to and learn next. This line of work aims to disambiguate these alternatives.

(Spoiler: current evidence suggests the fourth! Stay tuned!) 

As adults, we know that surprise signals encountering new information and results in a change in what someone knows. How does this understanding develop? In this line of work, I ask how infants:
(1) use others' surprise to guide their own learning, 

(2) use this emotion to infer the emoter's subsequent actions, 

(3) represent the cause of surprise, which is epistemic by nature. Specifically, can they treat surprise as evidence of discovering something that is new for that particular emoter? (check our new paper in Infancy!!)

Humans hold special expectations that people behave differently from inanimate objects. But what about the difference between these categories at a more fundamental level: the commitment regarding uniqueness of each indivdiual. 

As adults, we readily accept that artifacts (such as coffee mugs) can look identical to each other, whereas it is rare for human beings (such as your neighbors) or natural kinds (e.g., a rock) to look exactly alike. This project asks whether young infants and children also hold such expectations, and whether this knowledge about visual uniqueness is acquired through nature or nurture. 

When do we prefer novel information over the familiar, and when do we show the opposite preference? These questions are being answered in the Many Babies 5 data collection procedure, which I am contributing to.

And I am extending this further by asking whether individual differences in sensitivity to perceptual novelty are related to sensitivity to conceptual novelty, particularly when observations violate our existing understanding of the world, reflecting a domain-general curiosity about new information. Alternatively, these aspects can be monitored by distinct cognitive mechanisms. Stay tuned for the answer!

In collaboration with Lisa Feigenson (ofc), Shari Liu, and Qiong Cao

What do children think is possible, and are all impossible events equally impossible? In this project, I investigate how children distinguish and organize different kinds of impossible events, aiming to uncover a taxonomy of impossibility in the developing mind. 

I'm also teaching an intersession in January 2027 on the Science of Imagination! The link to the course will be posted here when available. 

Why do we tell folktales, and what makes them so enduring across cultures and generations? 

In this project, we investigate a framework under which folktales can be represented as sets of problems faced by the character and corresponding solutions (which may form a culturally shared episodic memory). We wonder whether common or distinct patterns of problem-solving emerge across stories from different cultural traditions (and how such patterns relate to other cultural fingerprints) and how such problem-solution pairs evolve through time. We are also interested in whether reading such stories helps individuals learn ways of solving problems beyond the fictional world. 

In collaboration with: Joseph Outa, Rhea Kapur & Jacob Foster