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.
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Thank you for your interest! We are not currently hiring for this position.
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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.
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Thank you for your interest! We are not currently hiring for this position.
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Thank you for your interest! We are not currently hiring for this position.
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Applications for summer 2025 are closed.
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!