My research explores the dynamic relationship between culture and cognition — how cultural environments shape the mind, and how the mind, in turn, shapes culture.

The first avenue of my work asks how culture influences cognition. I study how variation in the socioecological environment shapes decision-making, preferences, and social behavior across development, with a particular interest in identifying which aspects of cognition are universal and which are culturally variable.

The second avenue flips the question: I ask how cognition gives rise to culture, focusing especially on children, whose unique cognitive profile makes them underappreciated agents of cultural change. I study how children's tendencies toward exploration, creativity, and play generate novel cultural information, and how their peer groups transmit and amplify that variation across generations.