Research
My research examines how children represent other minds and use those representations to navigate social situations. Across projects, I combine behavioral methods with longitudinal and computational approaches.
Theory of mind and inhibitory control
This project asks how inhibitory control contributes to children’s developing ability to reason about other people’s beliefs. I approach the question through three connected components:
Dense longitudinal development
Following individual 3- and 4-year-olds repeatedly across theory-of-mind and inhibitory-control tasks to characterize developmental change within children.
Individual and age-related variation
Examining how performance across theory-of-mind and inhibitory-control tasks varies among 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds.
Computational modeling
Testing whether changes in inhibitory control can account for child-level changes in false-belief reasoning.
Related proceedings
Poyraz, E., Hemmer, P., & Leslie, A. M. (2026). Modeling how inhibitory control affects false-belief reasoning over time using dense longitudinal data. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Poyraz, E., Hemmer, P., & Leslie, A. M. (2020). Can changes in inhibitory control explain child-level theory of mind performance? Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1825–1832.
Knowledge states in numerical decisions
Investigating whether young children account for what another person knows when making numerical and resource-sharing decisions.
Children's number knowledge
Extending and developing models to infer children's underlying numerical knowledge.
Related proceeding
Poyraz, E., Hemmer, P., & Wang, J. (2026). How to best capture children’s number knowledge? Insights from a Bayesian graphical model. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL).
Epistemic action understanding in children
Examining how children infer another person’s epistemic goals—what they are trying to learn—from the actions they observe.