Ellis Cain
About
I currently am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computing program at Kenyon College.
How do we learn and change across a lifespan? How does what we learn within a lifespan relate to the constructs that are transmitted across generations? And (why) do different generations, who are exposed to the world for different periods of time, have similar mental representations? I study the relationship between individual cognitive development and cross-generational cultural transmission. I approach these questions, with language as a test case, using online/in-person behavioral experiments, large-scale dataset analysis, and computational modeling to better understand how individual minds both shape and are shaped by the broader communities that they belong to.
Areas of Study
- Lifespan Learning and Cognitive Development
- Psychology of Language
- Cultural Transmission and Evolution