Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS)
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Andre Eliatamby
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This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. André is a first language acquisition researcher interested in the acquisition of determiner phrase semantics and logical connectives, the early acquisition of functional categories, and theoretical issues concerning the semantics/pragmatics interface. He has a secondary interest in statistical methods, inductive inference, and the role of input in language acquisition. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2024.
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Callan Howland
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This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 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.
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Andre Oliver
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This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 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.
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Sten Knutsen
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This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Sten’s research focuses on spoken language, especially prosody and its role in comprehension and production. He is interested in both the acoustic realization of prosody and its functional role in communication, examining how patterns vary across gender, neurodivergent populations, and language backgrounds. His work draws on psychology, linguistics, and computer science to better understand the cognitive underpinnings of speech. Sten received his Ph.D. in psychology from Rutgers University in 2025.
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Jocelyn Yuxing Wang
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This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 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.
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Elif Poyraz
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This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 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.