Team News

MAY 2025

• Anushka and Brandon had a commentary accepted in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

• Anushka gave a talk at the California Workshop on Evolutionary Social Science!

• Amelia gave a talk at URCA Week! Joy and Amelia also presented posters at URCA week.

• At the meeting for the Society for Research in Child Development, Haowei and Mia (lab affiliates) gave poster presentations on work that they've been doing with Brandon, and Brandon gave a talk on close relationships and mental state reasoning.

• Our team started testing children and doing outreach at the Santa Barbara Zoo!

• Anushka and Brandon spoke with families and educators about social cognitive development at MOXI, a local science museum, for the opening of a new early childhood exhibit.

APRIL 2025

• Congratulations to Anushka, who had a poster accepted for presentation at the annual meeting for the Cognitive Science Society, and for having a paper accepted in the conference proceedings! Brandon also had a poster accepted for presentation, with a paper accepted in the proceedings.

• Congratulations to Amelia for getting into the UC LEADS program! This program will provide Amelia with a stipend to work with our lab this summer, a stipend to work with another UC lab next summer, and with professional development opportunities.

• Congratulations to Anushka for also having a talk accepted at the California Workshop on Evolutionary Social Science!

• Amelia and Joy submitted an abstract to present their URCA-funded work at URCA Week! They both had their posters accepted for presentation at URCA week! And a second congratulations to Amelia for also getting an oral presentation accepted for presentation at URCA week!

• Our team (co-leads: Dana, Destiny, and Vanessa) started doing community outreach at the LEAP Children's Center, working with children and educators.

• We welcomed two new undergraduate research assistants: Sydney Kauff and Zoe Gipson.

• Brandon spoke with first-generation and transfer students at a professor lunch hour event, co-hosted by the ONDAS Center, the Transfer Student Center, and A-CAUSE.

• Brandon gave a talk as part of the UCSB Prof Slam event, sharing our lab's research with alumni and the public.

MARCH 2025

• Emma Yu accepted an offer to join our team as a PhD student, and she was awarded a Chancellor's Fellowship!

• Anushka gave a data blitz on our lab's research at the Shared Reality Virtual Conference!

• Brandon, Anushka, Amelia, and Carly submitted our lab's first paper to a journal! This paper is a perspective piece, relevant to phenomena that Anushka, Amelia, and Carly are studying in the lab.

• We had end-of-quarter presentations from our first-quarter research assistants (Dana, Destiny, and Vanessa), and from Joy and Amelia, who are considering pursuing honors theses.

FEBRUARY 2025

• Anushka submitted a paper to present our research at CogSci 2025, and the lab submitted its first grant! 

• Our lab had its first presentation accepted (a data blitz) for the Shared Reality Virtual Conference. Anushka will be presenting our research on perspective-taking in social interaction.

• Joy, Amelia, and Raissa led lab meeting for the first time, sharing pilot data and discussing next steps.

• Anushka and Brandon presented the team's research to the developmental studies group meeting.

• Brandon spoke to first-generation students at the ONDAS Center about getting involved in research, highlighting the work of the first-generation college students in our lab, and to the Society for Undergraduate Psychologists about his journey in science and our lab's research.

• We got IRB approval to conduct studies in preschools! Thanks to Mia for supporting the literature search, and to Vanessa for helping to translate documents into Spanish.

JANUARY 2025

• Our team grew, with four new undergraduate research assistants: Dana Beas Alvarado, Destiny Laina, Jennifer Li, and Vanessa Rico.

DECEMBER 2024

• Amelia and Joy won funding from URCA to support their research in the lab! Congratulations!

NOVEMBER 2024

• The lab held its first Labapalooza event, where we learned about Halloween costumes, gardening, plays, music across cultures, and more!

• All of our undergraduate research assistants gave an end-of-quarter presentation on the research that they'd contributed to this quarter.

• Mia and Brandon visited the LEAP Children's Center, where we spoke with preschoolers and educators about science.

• Brandon spoke to students in the Promise Scholars Program about navigating UCSB as a first-generation college student.

• Anushka and Brandon gave talks to the social psychology area.

OCTOBER 2024

• Anushka finished data collection on our lab's first experiment, and she gave a talk on this research to the developmental studies group meeting.

• Anushka represented the UCSB Developmental Studies Group at the Santa Barbara Community Baby Shower.

SEPTEMBER 2024

• Our team welcomed our first undergraduate research assistants: Amelia Chen, Raissa Cheng, Brooke Johannessen, Mia Solomon, Joy Sun, and Carly Wolf.

• Anushka and Brandon spoke with new undergraduate students about research at the First-Gen and Transfer Scholars Welcome Event.

AUGUST 2024

• We got IRB approval, and our team tested our first participant.

JULY 2024

• The team begins! Our first members include Anushka Laha and Brandon Woo.

• The UCSB Office of Admissions interviewed Brandon; see the video here.