People
Since joining Rutgers, Julien has been working with students and faculty members from the Linguistics Department, the Department of Psychology, and the Philosophy Department. While at Rutgers, Julien directed the Psycholinguistics Laboratory and co-directed the Human Computational Cognition Laboratory. Julien also has a number of collaborators outside of Rutgers, at institutions in the US and around the world.
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Nipun Arora is a second year Ph.D. student in the cognitive area of psychology. Currently working in Data Science, Nipun has a B.E. degree in Control Systems and a Masters in Cognitive Science from Carleton University, Canada. It was in the Young India Fellowship where he was first introduced to Cognitive Science and nothing has ever been the same since. As a Data scientist, Nipun worked on machine learning projects to understand online behavior and used keystrokes dynamics and linguistic cues to detect fraud. For his research, Nipun is interested in belief formation and agency, particularly what kinds of experiences disempower people and make them lesser agents.
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Dr. Laura Saad received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 2023. She received her B.S. in psychology from the University of the Sciences. Her research interests include memory, agency, and cognitive modeling. Laura is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. When not working you will probably find Laura running, teaching color guard, or playing with her perfect cat, Lio.
Dr. Joseph Sommer received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 2022. He is interested in the bounded rationality of cognition under computational constraints and a broad intersection of fields relevant to belief including the philosophy of mental representation, epistemology, and the psychology of persuasion, reasoning, and judgment and decision making. His earlier research concentrated on Pascal Boyer’s Minimally Counterintuitive theory of the origin of supernatural concepts. His current work aims at understanding the function and mechanisms of belief formation and how beliefs are updated (or not) in response to evidence. Joseph is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS).
Dr. Asya Achimova received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 2014. During her years at Rutgers, Asya worked with Julien Musolino on the interaction of quantifiers, words such as ‘every’, ‘each’, and question terms, using experimental tools to address theoretical questions in linguistics. She then taught courses in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition, as well as Statistics in Linguistic Research, at the University of Leipzig. In Fall 2018, she started a 6-year research position joining the Ambiguity Group and the Neuro-Cognitive Modeling Lab at the University of Tübingen. Her current projects are devoted to modeling of ambiguity creation and resolution, and studying the role of ambiguity in communication and social interactions.
Jesus De Luna was a research assistant in the HCC lab from September 2018 to January 2020. He completed an honors thesis investigating the relationship between explicit and implicit agency, which led him to graduate with honors in January of 2020. Jesus is currently working as a clinical research assistant at Brown University where he is investigating early indicators for developmental concerns in infancy. He plans to pursue a PhD in cognitive science.
Chrystal Spencer was a research assistant in the HCC lab from September 2015 to May 2018. She completed a senior thesis investigating how counterintuitive concepts relate to memory, and graduated with honors in Psychology in May 2018. Chrystal is now a graduate student in the Biological and Health Psychology PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh.