I am a faculty member at Wesleyan University where I study the mental and underlying neural processes involved in human reasoning and decision making. My work looks at the behavioral outcomes of these higher order mental processes and takes into account sources of individual differences. Course I teach include Cognitive Psychology, Models of Decision Making, Concepts and Categories, and Statistics. I also participate in the Psychology Department’s program in Cognitive Science, and I am a faculty member of the interdepartmental program in Neuroscience and Behavior.

Before coming to Wesleyan, I held postdoctoral positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) in France, and the University of Michigan. I was also on the faculty of Ohio University. In these positions, I developed my research, with projects including how infants process simple number concepts and how adults use social categories for inference. Approaches were varied, and tools included behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies, both of which I continue to use in my current work.

My undergraduate degree was an A.B. in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from Brown University, where I conducted a research honors thesis on the influence of specific analogies on conceptual learning in the sciences. From there, I went on to earn my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Michigan. At Michigan, I focused on the role of memory encoding in flexible planning and goal recognition, and began work in conceptual reasoning and decision making, forming the foundation for my work.