At the Mind and Culture Lab (MaCLaB), we study the role of culture in children's social cognitive development, with a specific focus on the role of the imagination in everyday reasoning and how the imagination is shaped by cultural input.

Imagination gives us the opportunity to go beyond the here and now and entertain different possibilities. Thanks to imagination, we can think about how things could have been different, we can envision how our future might be. We can represent things, people, and events that we never encountered before. However, we often conceive of imagination as an unworldly childhood skill that we eventually outgrow at the expense of a more "mature" thinking, ignoring its critical role in how we make sense of the world. 

At the Mind and Culture Lab, we study the development of various cognitive processes that rely on the imagination, such as counterfactual thinking, judgments of possibility, conceptual learning, and social cognition.