Principal InvestigatorSteven Sloman  Graduate StudentsBabak Hemmatian  Babak
has a B.A. in Clinical Psychology from University of Tehran and is a
rising fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive Science and a second-year
Master's candidate in Computer Science at Brown University. He studies
how individuals conceive of knowledge others have and how these
perceptions affect their production and evaluation of causal explanations. To this end, he uses behavioral experiments and machine learning methods applied to large bodies of naturalistic text. Semir Tatlidil  Semir has a B.Sc. in Psychology from the University of
Liverpool. He is a first year PhD student in Cognitive Science at Brown University. His overall
interests fall in the domains of reasoning, thinking, decision making, and
developing formal models. His current work is focusing on how people outsource
moral judgements to experts in their community. Undergraduate ResearchersEleanor Bleiberg  Ellie is a third-year undergraduate pursuing a concentration in Economics. She is interested in behavioral sciences and decision making. Her work with the Sloman Lab has investigated the effect of mechanistic explanation on people’s openness to changing their opinion. Within this topic, she is exploring the effect of values based thinking in comparison to consequentialist thinking. Gloria Feng  Gloria is a third-year undergraduate concentrating in Behavioral Decision Science. She is interested in decision making and organizational behavior, and is currently planning to write an honors thesis on factors that influence cooperative decision making. Chun (Renee) Hu  Chun (Renee) is a fourth-year undergraduate concentrating in psychology. She is
interested in human reasoning and decision-making. Her work with the
Sloman Lab has investigated the effects of mechanistic explanation on
people's openness to changing their opinion. Within this topic, she
explored the effect of value-based thinking in comparison to
consequentialist thinking. Luana Mattos  Luana
is a second-year undergraduate pursuing a degree in Cognitive Science.
She is interested in subjects such as decision-making, framing and
consumer behavior. Her work in the Sloman Lab has focused on communities
of knowledge, how people’s perception of their own
understanding of a given topic is influenced by the knowledge of those
around them, as well as on the impact of polls on how voters perform
trade-offs between their political values and the outcomes they believe
to be more likely. Visiting ScholarsMarc Lluis  Marc received his degree in Psychology at the University of Barcelona in 2013. He is now a PhD student, and his broad interests are in judgment and decision-making, language, moral cognition, emotion, and social categorization. He is currently working in how using a foreign language changes our decisions from the moral domain to dealing with risk and interacting with others. Nat Rabb  Nat joined Sloman Lab while earning a B.A. from Brown University in
psychology and philosophy and currently works as a research coordinator
at Tufts University. He is interested in knowledge representation and
metacognition. He has been working on the “community of knowledge”
problem—the implications for individual cognition of the collective
nature of knowing—since 2014. Cristina Ballarini  Cristina did her undergraduate studies at Brown, pursuing double concentrations in Cognitive Science and Philosophy. She is now a Ph.D. student in philosophy at New York University. She is primarily interested in questions concerning human reasoning and rationality. Her past work with the Sloman Lab investigated the mechanisms underlying motivated reasoning, as well as philosophy and psychology of explanation. Julia Shube  Julia graduated from Brown with a B.A. in Cognitive Science in 2014. As an undergrad, she investigated the Illusion of Explanatory Depth and explored its connections with students' understandings of scientific processes. She earned her Masters in Secondary Math Education from City College of New York in 2015 and currently works as a math teacher at a public high school in New York City. James Verch  James is a third-year undergraduate pursuing a degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. He has broad interests in a variety of subjects, such as decision-making, emotion, visual and verbal styles of thought, abstraction, and the neural correlates of cognition. His work in the Sloman Lab has focused on how people make judgments on political issues. Specifically, he is exploring the effect of a community of knowledge: how other people's understanding of an issue affects my own understanding and decision-making. Graduate AlumniPhillip Fernbach  Phil Fernbach is an assistant professor of marketing in the Leeds School of Business. He holds a Ph.D. from Brown University in cognitive science and a B.A. from Williams College where he studied philosophy. His research interests span many areas of consumer behavior including causal reasoning, probability judgment, financial decision-making, and moral judgment. Gideon earned his B.S. in Engineering and Linguistics before receiving a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science. He has served as a university lecturer, a visualization consultant, and he currently leads user experience design for software startups. Adam Darlow  Ju-Hwa Park  Silvia Gennari David Lagnado Emanuel Robinson Clare Walsh Jeffrey Zemla |
