Director
Stella Christie
Associate Professor of Psychology
My research looks at how the mind acquires knowledge through the process of comparing and analogizing. I am interested in how the mind perceives similar events, objects, or actions that occur across time, and how comparing and contrasting these may result in the learning of new concepts. I view analogy and comparison as domain-general learning mechanisms, and have explored how these mechanisms impact acquisition of numerical concepts, spatial cognition, and language learning. Currently I’m investigating whether and how analogical and comparison learning play a role in the development of social cognition.
After having learned some wildly different languages, I became fascinated by the similarities and differences of structures and forms of the world languages. In my second line of research, I ask whether and how these language differences affect cognition and learning.
christie@swarthmore.edu Publications CV
Research Coordinator
Kiera Parece
I graduated from Wellesley College in 2017 with a Bachelors of Arts. As an undergraduate, I worked in a laboratory preschool, which sparked my interest in understanding children’s cognition.
Student Researchers
Eishna Ranganathan (Class of 2020)
Evan Orticio (Class of 2020)
Seetha Davis (Class of 2019)
MinJae Song (Class of 2019)
