Elif N. Poyraz, Ph.D.

Hi, I’m Elif.

I’m a Teacher-Scholar Postdoctoral Associate at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, where I conduct research at the Cognition and Learning Center.

My research asks how children form and use rich representations of other people’s beliefs, knowledge, and goals. I combine behavioral experiments, dense longitudinal studies, and computational modeling to understand both developmental change and the substantial variability within and across children.

I’m especially interested in measurement: how we turn abstract judgments into tasks, compare behavior across people or systems, and use patterns of success and error to understand what a response really means.

Across academic and applied projects, I translate complex behavioral questions into analyzable data: designing tasks, evaluating responses, modeling change, and communicating what the results imply.