Lab Members
Principal Investigator
Steven Sloman
Steve did his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University from 1986-1990 and then did post-doctoral research for two years at the University of Michigan. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition. Steven is a cognitive scientist who studies how people think. He has studied how our habits of thought influence the way we see the world, how the different systems that constitute thought interact to produce conclusions, conflict, and conversation, and how our construal of how the world works influences how we evaluate events and decide what actions to take.
Graduate Students
Semir Tatlidil
Semir has a B.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Liverpool. He is a fourth year PhD student in Cognitive Science at Brown University. He studies the role of causal knowledge in thinking and reasoning, and how people form abstract representations of causal events. He uses behavioral experiments and formal modeling to study these topics. He is also interested in using causal models to improve how robots solve problems.
Almos C. Molnar
Almos is a first year Ph.D. student in Cognitive Science at Brown University. He has a B.Sc. in European Politics, Society and Economics from the University of Birmingham, an M.A. in European Public Affairs from Maastricht University, and an M.A. in Philosophy from Central European University. He is interested in political cognition, and the nature of knowledge and rationality, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the community.
UNDERGraduate ALUMNI
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.
Erin Bugbee
Erin is interested in how ideas from artificial intelligence and statistics can be used to better understand the mind, as well as how we can build machines that learn in human-like ways.
Maddie Dick
Maddie is interested in decision making, reasoning and applications of data science in the workplace. Her work in the Sloman Lab investigateD human’s trust of algorithms in the workplace.
Cristina Ballarini
Cristina interested in questions concerning human reasoning and rationality. Her past work with the Sloman Lab investigated the mechanisms underlying motivated reasoning.
Eleanor Bleiberg
Ellie's work with the Sloman Lab has investigated the effect of mechanistic explanation on people’s openness to changing their opinion.
James Verch
James 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.
Visiting Scholars
Marc 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.
Graduate Alumni
Babak Hemmatian
I hold an M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University. I study how social narratives form, develop and are negotiated using computational text analysis and behavioral experiments. My current research focuses on Reddit discourse about hot topics with original datasets and modern neural networks. I will start a 3-year position as a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Jan 2022.
Phillip 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 Goldin
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
