Developmental cognitive scientist

Elif N. Poyraz, Ph.D.

I study how children understand other minds—and how inhibition, representational demands, and context shape that understanding over time.

Portrait of Elif Poyraz

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.