.jpg)
Tamsin C. German (german@psych.ucsb.edu)
Tamsin German studied Experimental Psychology at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, earning her B.A. in Experimental Psychology (1991), before moving to London to study at the Medical Research Council Cognitive Development Unit and the Department of Psychology, University College London, earning her Ph. D. in Psychology (1995). After a short appointment as a visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University during 1995 and a first faculty position at the Department of Psychology, University of Essex, UK, from 1996-2001, Tamsin accepted her current position at UCSB.
Adam Cohen graduated from Rutgers University in 2004 with a B.A. in Neuroscience and Cell Biology and a minor in mathematics. He studies the computational mechanisms that support "theory of mind" using reaction time, eye tracking, and fMRI. A few issues that have organized his recent research on ToM are domain-specificity, bottom-up processing, and connections between ToM and attention. He's also interested in the relationship between theory of mind and morality, and issues in the foundations of cognitive science (representationalism, computationalism, specialized vs general-purpose learning mechanisms, cognitive (im)penetrability, evolved developmental programs, neural constraints on computation).
Danielle Truxaw, Ph.D. is former CDL graduate student. In 2010, she completed her dissertation titled "Empirical Exploration of a Social-Mechanical Model of Tool Reasoning" and received her Ph.D. She is currently a post-graduate affiliate of the CDL and a visiting scholar at the UCSB Department of Psychology.
Jeff Niehaus graduated from Purdue University in 1996 with a bachelor's in psychology. After receiving a Master's degree in counseling at the University of Denver, he became interested in the ideas of natural selection as they applied to psychology. He chose UC Santa Barbara for its friendliness to these ideas, and came to UCSB to work with Dr. German in 2002. He is currently involved with using reaction-time procedures to investigate how motion gives us an impression of agency (or animacy) in simple objects. He is also interested in content effects in Theory of Mind, specifically when the context is a predator-prey relationship. Other projects include an fMRI study on the ability to detect pretense, using social information to detect agents, and the ability of children to quickly pick out and pay attention to animals and people. He has also thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to teach Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and a course on Genetics, Natural Selection, and Human Evolution during his time at UCSB. He has also taken the opportunity to develop new course materials for psychology 159, "Modern Approaches to Psychotherapy".
Annie Wertz earned her doctorate in 2009. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University. Annie is pursuing two lines of research: 1) investigating the cognitive mechanisms that allow infants to learn about the natural world, with a particular focus on how infants learn about plants, and 2) mapping the structure of the mechanisms that generate mental state representations (i.e., beliefs and desires) across the lifespan.
Jessica graduated from Northern Kentucky University in 2002 with a B.S. in Psychology and minor in Statistics. Her research with Dr. German includes investigating the role of competence and performance issues in successful belief-desire reasoning across the lifespan. Specifically, her work has included creating and administering a battery of belief-desire reasoning tasks and general cognitive assessment tasks to both young and elderly adult populations.
Meghan Roarty graduated from UCSB in 2003 with a B.S. in Biological Psychology. She is currently a graduate student working with Dr. German and Dr. Mike Miller. She is interested in studying the neural correlates that underlie theory of mind by taking a multidimensional approach. This type of approach will be used to assess theory of mind among various populations including normally developing individuals, individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Alzheimer Dementia patients, and Split-brain patients. She will be implementing both behavioral and neuroimaging studies in her work.
Max received his Ph.D. in Psychology from UCSB in 2010, and is currently a postdoctoral visiting researcher at the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology working with Drs. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Max is affiliated with the CDL, collaborating with Danielle Truxaw and Dr. German on several projects exploring children’s and adults' concepts of artifacts and their functions.
