Behavioral scientist
Elif N. Poyraz, Ph.D.
I work at the intersection of human judgment, cognitive measurement, and model evaluation—studying how people represent other minds, reason under uncertainty, and translate complex situations into measurable decisions.
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.