Ongoing Research
Development of Dream Concepts in Childhood
There is great variation in the way people understand the relationship between waking and dreaming life, which suggests that there are similarly diverse processes of enculturation through which children come to conceptualize dreams. Together with Yagmur Deniz Kisa (Max Planck Institute), we aim to investigate the emergence of children’s understanding of dream concepts and the way children interact with dreams through corpus analyses of child speech.
Children’s Perceptions Of Awe Experiences
Self-transcendent emotions, such as compassion, gratitude, and awe, have the capacity to move an individual beyond the boundary of the self and into values and behaviors beneficial for others and the greater good. These emotions have also been theorized to have evolutionarily adaptive functions. Awe, one of the profoundly moving self-transcendent emotions, is thought to be central to spiritual and peak experiences. Research suggests that awe is a collective emotion, which facilitates prosociality and helps people bond in social groups. As rich and profound as awe experiences are, are we able to appreciate awe experiences early in life? Across four studies, Fan Yang (University of Chicago) and I focus our work on 4-9-year-old children’s perceptions of awe experiences to better understand the origin of awe perceptions from a developmental perspective.
Find the full paper here.
Representative Past Projects
Mathematicians’ Use of Material Culture in Abstract Problem Solving
People interact with the material world as they work through and form ideas about abstract concepts. As a research assistant in the cognitive sciences, advised by David Landy (Netflix; Indiana University), I became interested in mathematics as a case study of embodied abstract reasoning and created a video corpus of mathematicians solving high-level problems at the chalkboard in order to study these interactions with physical space and material objects. We coded the inscriptions the mathematicians created as well as their subsequent interactions with them throughout their processes of solving using techniques from network theory to deepen our understanding of mathematical creativity as a complex system.
Embedded Mathematics in Traditionally Feminine Crafting Practices
Fiber and textile crafting practices are part of every cultural lineage. For centuries, women have knitted, stitched, and weaved the fabrics of their communities, and all of these forms of utilitarian art have all relied on deeply embedded mathematical principles. As a research assistant in the Creativity Labs, directed by Kylie Peppler (UC Irvine), I contributed to a series of ethnographies of crafting communities through the Re-Crafting Math Education project, with a collective goal to better theorize the connections between mathematics and traditional women’s crafts. In particular, we interviewed, observed, and learned from knitters, sewists, weavers, and quilters about the lived mathematical experiences intrinsic to processes of making in fiber and textile art, such as spatial reasoning, pattern identification, pattern drafting, and measurement. This project joins previous work with sewable electronic textiles to reveal the potential of soft fabrication in STEM education.