Lauren S. Aulet

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I direct the Cognitive and Neural Development Laboratory. My research asks how humans develop abstract concepts, with a focus on number, space, symbols, and reasoning.

A lot of my work is about measurement: how do we study thoughts and representations that people cannot simply report? This question comes up with young children, who often know more than they can explain, and with computational models, where we can test how different learning experiences change what a system represents.

I am also interested in what cognitive science can bring to the study of AI systems and the people who use them: how to evaluate reasoning, explanation, learning, and overreliance when the process behind an answer is not directly visible.