Research
Understanding what makes human intelligence unique remains one of the defining intellectual pursuits of our time. This pursuit has become newly urgent with the advent of artificial intelligence that can both solve complex mathematical problems and challenge our intuitions about agency, experience, and morality. Our research investigates the cognitive foundations of two of humanity’s most extraordinary intellectual achievements: mathematics and social reasoning. Through an integrative approach spanning psychology, computer science, and philosophy, and extending into education and development economics, we investigate how foundational intuitions give rise to abstract thought, how cognition unfolds in real-world contexts, and what these discoveries reveal about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence. We combine perceptual and conceptual experiments, language-learning paradigms, computational modeling, and large-scale field interventions, and we have pioneered a new paradigm that adapts AI methodology to probe the foundations of human intelligence.
We have active collaborations with economists, mathematicians, neuroscientists, educators, and humanists, and we have research partnerships with The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), Children Helping Science (the online infant and child lab), and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
If you’re interested in joining our lab as a doctoral student, click here to find out more information about applying to the program in Cognition & Perception at NYU.
