People | Comparative Cognition Laboratory

Faculty

The Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology Laurie Santos [website]
Laurie is the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center at Yale. She received her A.B. in Psychology and Biology from Harvard University in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard in 2003.

Lab Manager

Madeline Meade

Madeline graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology in the winter of 2022. She discovered her interest in social cognition through her undergraduate research with the lab on non-human primate theory of mind. As a center manager, she is interested in exploring standardized, multispecies cognitive studies and the impact of individual variation on cognitive abilites.

Graduate Students

Zach Silver
Zachary Silver is interested in how nonhuman animals learn from and about human agents. His research explores how dogs and other canid species use observed behavior to socially evaluate humans along serveral dimensions including morality, competence, and social rank. Zachary is also interested in the effects of formal training on sociocognitive development. Prior to beginning his work at Yale, Zachary graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University with a B.A. in Psychology and Music.

Amanda Royka
Amanda studies how humans and non-human primates infer and reason about the goals of other agents. Her work with humans focuses on how we infer communicative goals and create novel communicative signals based on recursive mental state inferences. Amanda also studies what representations underpin action prediction in non-human primates. Amanda graduated from Yale College with a B.S. in Cognitive Science in 2018, and received her Masters in Evolutionary Biology from Queen Mary University of London and her masters in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh.