People typically go about their day without being completely confused at every turn. This is striking! The world is so complex. And, people's brains are limited in attention and reasoning. How do people manage the complexity of the world with such limited cognition?
I work to answer this question by investigating the origins and development of certain cognitive systems that help us navigate our experiences. The mind simplifies the complex world. It directs our attention and narrows the predictions we make in new situations. Such simplification is necessary for going about our daily lives with relative ease—it allows us to use our cognitive resources efficiently.

So far, I have focused on two cognitive systems that direct inferences and learning across development. Specifically, I have investigated how people reason about categories and how people generate explanations.

Currently, I am focusing my interests on how people reason about social categories (e.g., women, Black people, Christians). There are particularly important implications for how our cognitive systems support reasoning about social groups. We overlook idiosyncrasies of individuals that make up the groups, make inferences about those individuals using their group memberships, and more easily treat group members as interchangeable. With a better understanding of the cognitive systems that support our reasoning about social categories we can more effectively target interventions to avoid the negative consequences of our simplifications—namely, stereotyping and prejudice.