Join the Lab

The Infant Mind and Cognition Lab at Yale studies logical cognition and its development, with a focus on preverbal infancy and expanding to young children and adults. Our approach combines frameworks and methods from developmental psychology, vision science, psycholinguistics, and philosophy. Primary topics of interest include logical cognition – both in the traditional sense and broadly speaking –, abstract concepts, learning, the interface between perception and cognition, language acquisition, metacognition, comparative cognition, the development of planning and decision-making, and the distinction between discursive and iconic representations in the mind.

  • Thank you for your interest! We are not currently hiring for this position.

  • Dr Cesana-Arlotti is accepting PhD students to start in August 2026. Interested students should apply by Dec 1st, 2025, through the developmental track in Yale’s psychology PhD program. Candidates should indicate Dr. Cesana-Arlotti as a prospective supervisor and articulate in their materials the match between their background and research interests and the topics of interest of the Infant Mind and Cognition lab.

  • Thank you for your interest! We are not currently hiring for this position.

  • Thank you for your interest! At this time, we are not accepting new research assistants for Spring 2026. Please check back in later for updates on recruitment for Fall 2026

    If you’d like to submit your application materials, please fill out this form. Applications submitted now will be kept on file and reviewed during our Fall 2026 recruitment process. For questions and inquiries, please contact the lab manager, Christine Kwon, at c.kwon@yale.edu.

  • The Infant Mind and Cognition Lab is now accepting Research Assistant applications for Summer 2026 through March 2, 2026 by 12pm EST. Please click here to apply.


    Main Duties and Responsibilities: Summer interns will be responsible for a variety of tasks, including conducting online studies with infants and children over Zoom, participant recruitment and scheduling, and video coding. Each intern will be paired with a mentor in the lab (e.g., a graduate student, postdoc, or lab manager) and will learn more about the lab's research through reading theoretical and empirical papers, attending lab meetings, and delivering presentations. 
    Time Commitment: Our internship program requires a commitment of eight full-time weeks to be completed between June 1, 2026 and July 31, 2026 (exact dates TBD). Expected time commitment is 40 hours per week. Interns must commit to being in-person at Yale University for the entire duration of the program.

    Please note that at this time, we are mainly considering Yale undergraduates that will be able to secure their own funding through Yale funding opportunities (e.g., Summer Experience Award, etc.). If you are a non-Yale student and would like to be considered for our summer internship, please contact the lab manager, Christine Kwon, at c.kwon@yale.edu.

Our projects with research assistants opportunities:

Logic in and out of visual perception

Do we use rapid logical computations to understand visual information in our everyday surroundings? In our research, we’re diving into the seamless mental connections between logical inference and visual perception. Imagine you see two objects about to collide: do we use a deductive inference to anticipate the consequences of this event? We are developing a series of infant and adult experiments that test the properties and capabilities of this remarkable vision-logic interface.

Preverbal Logic and Linguistic Logic

How do children develop the ability to make inferences using language? While they can make rich inferences from visual information, they often struggle when similar reasoning is required in a linguistic context. Our research examines when young children begin to draw inferences through language and investigates whether their ability to reason non-linguistically supports the development of linguistic inference skills. We explore whether the cognitive mechanisms guiding these preverbal inferences are the connected with ones that shape linguistic meanings, particularly in young children.

Representation of Possibilities

How do children understand possibilities? For example, do babies predict only a single outcome when observing rolling a dice (e.g., 5)? Or, can they also understand that other options are possible (e.g., 6)? In other words, can they differentiate what actually happened from what might have happened?

Social Inferences

Humans are social animals. To navigate and interact with others in this social world, it is essential to be able to understand others' goals and thoughts through their actions. How early does such social capacity emerge, and how does it relate to, or rely on, the logical capacities infants may or may not have? How do such logical capabilities empower future learning? If you are interested in the interface between logical inference and social cognition through the lens of developmental psychology, come check out the project!