About us

In the Causal Cognition Lab, we ask how people’s prior background knowledge and beliefs influence the judgments they make about new people and situations. Our general approach is to concurrently address basic issues in cognitive science and applied issues in clinical science and practice. From the perspective of cognitive science, our work addresses how causal and explanatory beliefs are mentally represented and organized, and how this representation affects basic cognitive processes such as categorization, memory, judgments, and decision-making. From the perspective of clinical science, we simultaneously examine how people’s prior knowledge, beliefs, and expectations influence the assessment and diagnosis of medical and mental illness, memory for patients’ symptoms and medical information, judgments of psychological abnormality, and decisions about treatment. Our current work examines these issues in students, lay people, patients, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and primary care physicians.

The lab is closed to new students for the 2019-20 academic year.