The Development of
Social Cognition Lab
at UC - Irvine
There are lots of ways to play our games!
Stop by our lab: We are now accepting in-person appointments for child scientists! Please fill out our form here to request an in-person appointment.
Meet us at children's museums: Come visit us at Pretend City in Irvine and Discovery Cube in Santa Ana - we hope to see you there!
Met us online: We also have new online studies for child scientists ages 3 to 10 here.
What We Do
The Development of Social Cognition Lab (DoSC Lab) investigates how we learn to reason about the social world. Within a rapid timeframe, we learn how to interact with others, acquire rules of social behavior, and actively question, change, and position ourselves within our social worlds. The DoSC Lab investigates the remarkable process through which we learn these skills, the core cognitive competencies underlying them, and the developmental trajectories of them.
Our specific research topics include the development of fairness and prosocial behavior, how we learn from choice and agency, the development of prospection (future-oriented thinking), and how our social contexts and cognitive competencies shape our emerging world views. We typically conduct behavioral studies with young children and adults.
Please navigate through these pages to find out more about our work.