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Courtney Baugh is a sixth-year graduate student in the Developmental area of the Psychology Department at UCR. Her research interests include how, why, and what children learn from media, and the role that feelings of similarity play in relating to and learning from media characters. She is currently involved in a study that is looking at how children identify with media characters, and how that affects prosocial learning. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and Child Development from California State University, Stanislaus, and an M.A. in Developmental Psychology from University of California, Riverside.
Koeun Choi worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2016 – 2017, studying young children’s learning and transfer, utilizing behavioral and eye-tracking measures to understand cognitive development and learning processes. She is currently an assistant professor directing the Cognitive Developmental Science (CoDeS) lab in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Virginia Tech.
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Ali Conover is a fourth-year graduate student in the Developmental area of the Psychology Department at UCR. Her research interests include children’s understanding of religious concepts across multiple religious affiliations and the role of religious rituals as an emotion-regulation strategy. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach.
Rachel Flynn worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2008 – 2013, studying interactive media’s influence on the development of executive functioning skills. During that time, she completed research on the impact of active video game (i.e. Wii Fit) play on children’s executive functioning in a five week summer in a poverty-impacted neighborhood for two consecutive summers. Rachel’s dissertation research examined the acute impact on executive functioning skills, such as attention and self-regulation, of exercise, active video games, and traditional video games. She holds a B.S. in Biopsychology and Cognitive Science from the University of Michigan and a M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University’s Teachers College. She currently works as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Social Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine and is the Associate Director at the Institute for Innovations in Developmental Science at Northwestern University.
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Elena Guerrero Galaz was a lab coordinator for the Childhood Cognition Lab. She holds a B.S in Psychology from the University of California, Riverside and worked as a research assistant and leader in the lab during her undergrad. Her research interests revolve around cognitive development, more specifically how children are developing their belief systems, the effect of anthropomorphism in the relationship between children and God, and how children use rituals to understand different events (e.g. death, social movements, illnesses). Elena is now a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz working with Dr. David Menendez trying to understand how children perceive death and the afterlife through different cultural rituals.
Ahmed Ibrahim worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2014 – 2016 focusing on digital applications and STEM. He is currently working as a Senior Education Research Consultant at Johns Hopkins University.
Email: ahmed.ibrahim.phd@gmail.com
Hea Jung Lee completed her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include how imagination and fantasy belief may influence children's understanding of social relationships.
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Kirsten Lesage was a graduate student in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2014 – 2020, studying how culture and religion affect cognitive development in early childhood. During that time, she completed research on a longitudinal study in the lab examining children’s conceptions of prayer, supernatural beings, and causal mechanisms (project title: “R’GOD: Development of Religious Cognition”) as well as a collaborative study with Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas and Dr. Aiyana Willard on how participation in magic or religious rituals relate to (dis)trust and blame attribution in communities in Mauritius. Kirsten’s dissertation research examined how the cultural context shapes parents’ and children’s causal explanations for the causes and treatments of biological illnesses across cultures (Mexican-American, Catholics in the USA, Catholics in Colombia, and Hindus in Mauritius) (project title: “ESBI: Explanatory Systems for Biological Illnesses”). She holds a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from Northwestern College. She currently works at Pew Research Center on the Religion and Public Life team, specializing in international survey research.
Ph. D.,
University of Texas, 2015
E-mail: Boli.Reyes-Jaquez@unh.edu
Dr. Boli Reyes-Jaquez is a Developing Belief Network postdoctoral researcher. He studies human development, with a focus on how cognitive, social, and cultural factors influence two fundamental domains of social evaluation: competence and morality. Before joining the team at UCR, he obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. After spending the next two years teaching in the Dominican Republic as a visiting scholar while fulfilling requirements of a Fulbright fellowship, he returned to the U.S. as a President’s postdoctoral research fellow at University of Minnesota, working with Dr. Melissa Koenig. His most recent work examined in different cultures children’s moral judgments of power abuse in the form of bribery; current interests include testing whether at some point in development concepts like moral fallibility (e.g., overstepping one’s authority) are deemed uniquely human, or also applicable to supernatural agents.
Ashley Ricker Gyllen worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2013 – 2016 studying the development of episodic memory and metacognition. Her dissertation examined the influence of interactive media and video games on encoding processes and metacognitive abilities. From 2017 - 2019 Ashley held a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Excellence in Biopsychosocial Approaches to Health (CEBAH) at Chapman University working with Dr. Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, and from 2020 - 2021 held a Postdoctoral Fellowship and Research Faculty appointment in the Department of Integrative Physiology at CU Boulder working with Dr. Monique LeBourgeois. She has held affiliate faculty and visiting lecturer roles at both UC Irvine and MSU Denver. Following her academic appointments, Ashley worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Pearson and Head of Learning Research at the EIT InnoEnergy Skills Institute. She is currently the Owner and Principal Consultant of her own practice, R&G Solutions, LLC, helping organizations build scalable research, data analytics, and operational systems.
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Michael Robb worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2005 – 2010, studying the impact of media on children’s learning. During that time, he completed research on the impact of baby DVDs on young children’s language development, problem solving abilities, and early literacy outcomes. Michael’s dissertation examined the impact of an interactive storybook on parent-child dialogic reading and children’s story comprehension. He is currently Head of Research at Common Sense Media, overseeing the research program, evaluation of organization impact, and program development research. Michael’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and many other news outlets.
Anondah Saide
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Anondah Saide worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2013-2018. Her research interests pertained to children’s abstract concept development. For example, she received grant funding to examine (1) secularization among adults and concepts of death using a novel physiological research paradigm, and (2) children’s development of religious and scientific concepts (in both religious and secular populations). She also worked on a six-wave longitudinal study in the lab examining children’s conceptions of prayer and God, reality/fantasy distinctions, and possibility reasoning. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of North Texas: https://coe.unt.edu/people/anondah-saide.html
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Molly Schlesinger was a graduate student in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2012-2017, where her research focused on young children’s social cognitive development, problem solving skills, and STEM learning from educational media. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 2017 from UCR and a B.A. from Hampshire College in 2012. From 2017-2019, she was a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek on playful learning, creativity, and Playful Learning Landscapes. Molly is currently a Statistician in her home town in the Office of Evaluation, Research, and Accountability at the School District of Philadelphia.
Nicholas Shaman worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2009 – 2016, where his research focused on children’s cognitive development, religious concepts, and how those influence and are influenced by their religious experiences. His dissertation examined the influence of religious rituals on children’s learning of religious concepts. He received his B.A. in Psychology and Religious Studies from Boston University. Nicholas is currently an Assistant Professor at Anne Arundel Community College.
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Erin Smith worked in the Childhood Cognition Lab from 2006-2011, where her research focused on the development of religious concepts and how these kinds of concepts are differentiated from other concepts (scientific, fantastical, etc.) within and across cultures. Currently, she serves in California Baptist University’s Center for Faculty Development as the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Research and a professor of psychology. Her research focuses on science and religion, especially Christian (dis)engagement with science and the practical application of psychological science in church communities, and on the scholarship of teaching and learning, especially the persistence and uprooting of students’ psychological misconceptions. More information available at erinsmithpsychology.com.