People – Causality and Mind Lab

Primary Investigator

David Sobel received his BA in Psychology and Computer Science from Swarthmore College and his MA and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California. He joined the Brown faculty in 2001. He is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed publications as well as the co-editor of the book Cognitive Development in Museum Settings: Relating Research to Practice.

Click here to see Dr. Sobel’s CV

Graduate Students

Heyang Yin

Heyang is a third year doctoral student where her research interest is in children’s social learning. She completed her Masters of Education at Harvard University prior coming to Brown.

Sarah Kiefer

Sarah is a second year Ph.D. student in the lab. She graduated from Arizona State University in 2019 with a B.S. in Psychology. Prior to Brown, she worked as a research coordinator at the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center (SARRC) and then as a Lab Manager of the Emerging Minds Lab at Arizona State University (PI: Kelsey Lucca). Her research examines children’s early learning through exploration, causal reasoning, and effort allocation.

Skyler Gin

Skyler is a second year Ph.D. student in Psychology at Brown University in the CLPS department. Skyler earned her B.S. in Child Development at California Polytechnic State University and M.S. in Psychology at the University of Oregon. Her current research at Brown combines theories and methods from social psychology with those from developmental psychology to assist in understanding children and their parents’ formation of race/ethnic identity and how that may affect children’s learning in and out of school settings.

Lab Manager

Brooke Jordan

Brooke received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in the Fall of 2023, where she completed her departmental honors thesis investigating how the experience of learning progress interacts with children’s future learning preferences. Broadly, she is interested in how methods of evaluation interact with children’s learning outcomes and learning engagement.