Who Am I?
Hi y'all! I'm Bobby, and I am an incoming Psychology PhD Student at Harvard University working with Dr. Ashley Thomas. I previously worked in the Stanford Language & Cognition Lab with Dr. Michael Frank. I graduated from Stanford in 2022 with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems concentrated in Cognitive Science. As an undergrad, I was an Honors Student in the Social Learning Lab with Dr. Hyowon Gweon and Dr. Aaron Chuey.
Research Interests
Humans learn efficiently from environments that are simultaneously structured and fluctuate in ways both stable and unpredictable. From infancy, we manage to exploit regularities in our environment while remaining sensitive to meaningful change. What mechanisms allow children to navigate such varied contexts so effectively? Broadly, I am interested in how children flexibly build and use structured representations to guide adaptive cognition. How do children acquire representations of the structure of input from their physical and social environments? How do children use these representations to adaptively guide reasoning, learning, and behavior in a given context? How does this capacity develop across childhood? To address these questions, I aim to take an interdisciplinary approach combining behavioral and computational methods from cognitive and developmental science.
Thomas Lab
Among the most consequential representations children build are those of their social world: the people in their environment and the relationships among them. Children must be able to represent many different kinds of people, ranging from particular individuals embedded in thick, specific relationships to general agents whom we only represent with category-level knowledge, and this distinction may affect how infants and children learn from and reason about the people around them. In the Thomas Lab, I am interested in how children develop concepts of particular and general agents, and how this development shapes both their thinking about minds and how they navigate early learning.
My "Village"
As a First-Generation college graduate and researcher forever trying to find my way in this field, I feel so grateful to have been supported by a network of such brilliant, kind, and inspiring mentors, collaborators, and peers. "It takes a village", and I owe so much to my village for teaching and uplifting me. Forever celebrating and thanking my village: Hyowon Gweon, Michael Frank, Bria Long, Aaron Chuey, Virginia Marchman, Veronica Boyce, Alvin Tan, Rebecca Zhu, Aneesa Conine-Nakano, Sarah Tung, Joseph Outa, Grace Keene, Fredo Ornelas, & Mar Lacsamana