Our Research Team
Director
Stella Christie
Research Chair
Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence
Professor
Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Tsinghua University
Director
Tsinghua University Child Cognition Center
A native of Indonesia, Stella received her B.A. from Harvard University in 2004, and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2010. Prior to moving to Tsinghua, she was a tenured associate professor at Swarthmore College.
Stella researches the Relational Mind: how cognitive systems learn relations and structures of the world. Using behavioral data from young human children and great apes, Stella’s work has discovered tantalizing similarities and differences between humans’ and other animals’ relational cognition. Eventually, her aim is to chart the precise learning algorithms that any mind uses to abstract relations. Having lived in six countries on all hemispheres, Stella holds a special interests in how relational reasoning is influenced by and influences language, culture, and social interactions.
In her spare time, Stella loves to scale mountains and languages—she currently speaks 5 languages
Postdoc
Yang Gao
Dr. Yang Gao received her Ph.D. from the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. She was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University from September 2023 to January 2024. Her research investigates how analogies are generated in explanation. By comparing how human parents and large language models explain things in response to children's questions, she addresses three questions, including: Are analogical explanations better than other kinds of explanations? What factors shape whether a person produces an analogical explanation? And what conditions lead people to produce more analogical explanations? In her postdoctoral work, Dr. Gao applies analogical reasoning to research on creativity education.
Lab Manager
Tao Xie
Tao Xie graduated with a bachelor's degree from Hunan University and a Master's degree from The University of Nottingham in the UK. She is in charge of the administrative management, financial management, industry-academia-research collaboration expansion, personnel training, and partial project management at the Child Cognition Center, providing support for various scientific research endeavors within the Center. Her current research interests primarily encompass Child-Friendly Cities and Thinking Through Design. Prior to joining the lab, she had over six years of experience in the United States as a senior executive and more than thirteen years working experience in the international business sectors and large state-owned enterprises.
Graduate Students
Qiuchen Ma
She is a Doctoral student in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. Her current research focuses on the rule learning ability of children, adults and AI. What kind of things can people learn rules from? What kind of limitations does the learning of rules face? Are the rules and forms that people learn completely abstract? Her research is dedicated to exploring the influencing factors of rule learning ability and helping people better learn abstract rules from specific things.
Yijin Fang
She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on individual’s exploratory behavior in the uncertain contexts. She is working on understanding: what kind of exploration strategies individuals adopt to cope with uncertainty? How do internal (e.g., knowlegde states; confidence) and environmental factors (e.g., time pressure; diversity and complexity) influence people’s exploration? and what is the developmental trajectory of these exploratory strategies?
Lingqin Meng
Lingqin Meng is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. In 2024, he received a Master’s degree in Electronic Information Engineering, also from Tsinghua University. His research interests lie in the theory and applications of natural language processing and language acquisition.
Jingyun Zhang
She is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. Her research interests center on children’s language and cognitive development. She studies how children comprehend, learn, and use language, and how language ability and cognitive development are related. Through this work, she hopes to build a clearer account of the patterns that characterize children’s linguistic and cognitive development.
Yuru Mao
She is a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University, complementing her academic endeavors with work in the internet industry where she works in brand marketing and business analysis. With a keen interest in cognitive decision-making, she is dedicated to exploring the important cognitive elements such as relational and analogical reasoning. Her research endeavors to draw insightful comparisons between children and AI, aiming to inspire innovative approaches to enhance the decision-making capabilities of young minds.
Qiang Zhou
He is a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University, interested in researching the factors that can influence or explore behavior.
Undergraduate Students
Jinru Cai
She is an undergraduate student in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University. Her research interests lie in children’s language use and cognitive performance within parent-child conversational contexts, with a particular focus on exploring the similarities and differences in cognitive mechanisms underlying parent-child interaction and human-LLM interaction.
Yuchen Dou
She is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at Tsinghua University, with a minor in Psychology. Her academic interests focus on child cognition and language development. She is presently engaged in laboratory work, contributing to science communication initiatives and providing research support. She aspires to become a speech-language therapist, integrating research experience with evidence-based clinical intervention in her future professional practice.
Researchers and Research Assistants
Yifan Zuo
She graduated from the School of Finance of the Central University of Finance and Economics as an undergraduate and then completed her graduate studies at Tulane University in the U.S. She has seven years of experience in investment banking. Having developed a strong interest in parenting, she pursued and completed a graduate program in Child Studies and Human Development at Tufts University in the United States. In her life, she is passionate about volunteering in public schools and enjoys writing and taking care of her parenting public website.
Alumni
Shuai Shao
PhD. candidate UCSD
Sinuo Jia
Staff, Tsinghua University
Yue Geng
Master. UCSD
Qisen Yang
PhD. candidate Tsinghua University
Siqi Zhang
PhD. candidate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Yuwei Xu
Undergraduate, NYU
Yuanqing Wu
Undergraduate, Loughborough University
Weining Deng
Graduate, Tsinghua Unviersity
Tian Qiu
Master, Harvard
Shiyu Dong
Master, HKU
Jingyu Xi
PhD. candidate, Konstanz
Zijin Tan
PhD. candidate UCSD
Shang Li
PhD. candidate, Vanderbilt University
Hetao Zhang
Master, Oxford University
Lvshu Chen
Master, HKU
Haibo Sun
PhD. candidate, Brandeis University
Yufei Ren
Lecturer, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Haowen Xue
Master, UCL
kexin Que
PhD. candidate, Northwestern University
Wenjia Tan
Master, University of Macau
Zhou Xingyu
Staff, China Energy Engineering Group Co.
Jinyun Lyu
Assistant Research Fellow, Nankai University
Weiwei Fan
PhD. candidate, Central Conservatory of Music
