hurstm@uchicago.edu Download CV michelleahurst1 OSF osf.io/ukhsz
Hi There!
I’m a Developmental Scientist studying how the way we think changes
across two timescales - in-the-moment context effects and long-term
effects of experience.
My work is motivated by the observation that human cognition
doesn’t happen in a vacuum: it often differs between people, over time,
and across contexts. I am particularly interested in variation across
contexts; cases where contextual features impact cognitive processing by
eliciting different cognitive processes, even within the same
individual. To investigate these questions, I use behavioral
experiments, computational models, and a developmental perspective with
infants, children, and adults. This approach allows for developing and
quantitatively testing more complete cognitive theories that can speak
to causal mechanisms, while also providing key insights that can be
leveraged to improve children and adults’ learning and behavior.
I currently work as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago, where I’m working on several projects funded by an NICHD K99 Pathway to Independence Award investigating the development of proportional reasoning specifically.This project studies infants, children, and adults across a range of proportional reasoning domains - from basic perceptual discrimination to decision making - using behavioral experiments and computational models.