What makes you most excited about teaching?

I’m most excited to teach Animal Minds this year. This course provides a unique opportunity to explore animal perception and cognition, and to get some perspective on the unusual state of being a human animal. It gives students a chance to witness the extraordinary ways in which animals perceive and interact with their environment. It’s like a big celebration of species diversity in mental life. One of the most enlightening moments in teaching this course is when students begin to realize that there are phenomena in the natural world that are out of reach for human perception. For instance, certain flowers have hidden patterns that are invisible to us but serve as beacons for pollinators like bees. And, some animals feel the pull of the earth’s magnetic fields and calculate their bearings from it. There are whole dimensions of energy that are invisible to us. These kinds of revelations expand students' perspectives on the world and themselves, emphasizing that our human perspective is just one lens through which we view reality.

What are your current research interests?

My current research interests involve understanding the development and origins of complex reasoning in humans and non-humans. Currently, I'm deeply involved in a comparative cognition research project that investigates the continuity of pattern reasoning between monkeys and human children aged 3 to 6. This project tests whether the ability to engage in relational reasoning (i.e., reasoning about relative patterns like ‘alternating’ or ‘equivalence’) is unique to humans or shares evolutionary roots with our primate relatives. Children and monkeys are tested with touchscreens on the same nonverbal problem-solving tasks that challenge them to find patterns in abstract images, and we compare how monkeys perform compared to children of different ages. Through a series of carefully designed cognitive experiments, we are exploring the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning in both species, aiming to provide valuable insights into the fundamental nature of complex thought.

Additionally, my research extends beyond the laboratory, as I'm developing a STEM outreach project called Primate Portal. This is a public primate cognition exhibit I’ve built with the Seneca Park Zoo in New York. It is designed to bridge the gap between scientific research and the broader community by involving elementary school students and teachers in our work. We help elementary school students write computer code to create their own ‘game’ for monkeys to play that tests the monkeys’ intelligence, and the student coders come to the zoo to watch the monkeys play the games they coded. Through these hands-on research experiences, we aim to enhance children’s computational thinking and coding skills and spark lively enthusiasm for science. Overall, my research interests encompass both the theoretical exploration of complex reasoning in humans and the practical application of these insights to promote STEM education and public scientific engagement with coding and cognition.