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
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
Yang Gao
She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. Her research is dedicated to exploring the spontaneous generation of analogies in explanations. By comparing the explanations given by human parents and large language models to children’s questions, she investigates: Are analogical explanations superior to other types of explanations? What factors influence the generation of analogical explanations during the explanation process? What can promote the spontaneous generation of more analogical explanations?
Jinyun Lyu
She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on children’s play and cognitive development. Can children learn through play? What behaviors and factors during play can enhance learning? Does the availability of play opportunities in a child’s environment directly influence their ability to learn through play? Additionally, she is actively involved in building child-friendly cities.
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 graduated from Tsinghua University in 2024 with a M.S. degree in Electronic Information Engineering, and is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. Recently he has been studying and experimenting with cognitive computational modeling.
Xinyi Zhang
Xinyi Zhang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University.She is interested in cognitive science.
Yufei Ren
She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Foreign Languages, Tsinghua University. Currently focused on the study of language characteristics and psychological mechanisms of children with mood disorders, aiming to explore the complex relationships among emotion, cognition, and language expression in these children. The goal is to provide a linguistic perspective for the diagnosis and treatment in clinical psychiatry.
Yuanyuan Xu
Yuanyuan Xu is a graduate student at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University. She received a bachelor of Arts degree in Japanese language and a bachelor of Management in Administration from Tsinghua University in 2019. She is very interested in the relation between language and cognition. Her research interest lies in the field of cognitive linguistics, comparative linguistics, and the development of children’s language and cognition.
Huiying Yang
She is a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Brown University, USA. Engaged in research and development of educational content for children, with experience working in various educational settings such as children’s museums, kindergartens, and international high schools. Research interests include: What factors can influence and promote children’s active learning and exploratory behavior in the AI era? How to guide and adapt to the characteristics and needs of different children?
Weiwei Fan
She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. Previously, she served as the content editor-in-chief for applications related to children’s health and education, where she planned and produced widely popular educational courses. Her research focuses on whether the prevalent “guan” (control) beliefs held by parents in today’s family education environment support the development of children’s agency and which parenting beliefs are more conducive to fostering this agency. She aims to explore how parental beliefs impact children’s agency to provide valuable insights for parent-child interactions in everyday family education.
Yuru Mao
Yuru 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
Yujia Zhang
She is a current international undergraduate student in the class of 2020 in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University, specializing in the areas of language development and educational psychology. She is particularly interested in the impact of these factors on children’s cognitive and emotional development, and is also passionate about exploring how individualized teaching strategies and social interactions can contribute to children’s early psychological growth.
Yanxi Zhu
She is a current undergraduate student in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University, Class of 2022, who is interested in children’s cognitive development of language and learning decision-making processes. She is currently exploring the cognitive learning process of children’s exploratory/exploitative behaviors.
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.
Xiaojie Tian
She is studying for her master’s degree at the School of Education, Renmin University of China, with a research focus on mental health education. She is passionate about educational psychology, especially focusing on children’s psychological development and positive growth. Through her research, she hopes to explore scientific methods that can promote children’s optimistic and positive growth and contribute to the field of children’s mental health education.
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
Haowen Xue
Master, UCL
Zhou Xingyu
Staff, China Energy Engineering Group Co.
