Post Doctoral Associates

Callan (Cal for short) received their PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University. They work at the interface of semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics, with a particular eye toward the role of perspectives in lexical meaning. Drawing on both experimental and theoretical methodology, their research revolves around questions like: How capable are hearers in accommodating stubborn speakers? How conversationally flexible are lexically encoded perspectives? Do different categories of lexical items (e.g. predicates of personal taste, relative motion verbs, socio-cultural relative terms) exercise different constraints on the perspectives they invoke? Topics they have worked on include relative locative terms, socio-cultural relatives, and epithets and thick terms.

Jocelyn received her PhD in philosophy from MIT in 2024, prior to which she received her BA in philosophy from Yale. Her research interests are at the intersection of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Her research broadly considers creative thought, and other closely related forms of unguided thoughts, such as mind wandering. Some of her research theorizes about the role of attention, memory and other underlying processes of creative thoughts, as well as how understanding them better brings out implications in epistemology. She also has broader research interests in providing philosophical interpretations of computational models in cognitive science.

Andre earned his PhD in Psychology from the Graduate Center—City University of New York (CUNY) in 2025. His research broadly focuses on social identity, person perception, and social inequality. In this work, he investigates how social identity shapes people's mental representations of faces from specific social groups and how those mental representations influence decisions and judgements about social inequality. He also studies how social identity-related cognitions impact intergroup interactions and expectations to develop interventions to improve those interactions. 

 Elif received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University in 2025, along with a certificate in Cognitive Science. She earned her B.S. in Psychology from Middle East Technical University in Türkiye. Her research investigates how people understand and reason about others’ actions without direct access to their thoughts, with a particular focus on the developmental origins of this ability. She examines the factors that shape children’s performance on tasks requiring reasoning about mental states, as well as developmental changes in variability over time. At the Cognition and Learning Center, she studies how children’s inferences about others’ mental states extend to different domains, such as numerical quantities of resources.