Adena Schachner

I and my Mind and Development Lab study the cognitive processes that allow children to understand other people, and the social meaning of things people create, such as tools, art, music, and technology. My lab also studies the origins of musicality, asking why human musicality is so early developing, universal across cultures, and socially impactful from early in life. Our work has been funded by the NSF, NIH, APF, and GRAMMY Foundation.

• Bennette, E., Metzinger, A., Lee, M., Ni, J., Nishith, S., Kim, M., & Schachner, A. (2021). Do you see what I see? Children’s understanding of perception and physical interaction over video chat. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 1-11, https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.276.
•  Savage P.E., Loui, P., Tarr, B., Schachner, A., Glowacki, L., Mithen, S., Fitch, W.T. (2020). Music as a coevolved system for social bonding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X20000333
•  Pesowski, M.L., Quy, A.D., Lee, M., & Schachner, A. (2020). Children use inverse planning to detect social transmission in the design of artifacts. In: S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, B. Armstrong, editors. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, p.845-851.
•  Kim, M. & Schachner, A. (2021). From music to animacy: Causal reasoning links animate agents with musical sounds. In: T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, K. Teßmar-Raible, editors. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.