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Natalia Vélez

Assistant Professor

No one can play a symphony, build a city, or advance scientific understanding entirely on their own. How do humans combine their limited knowledge and resources into something greater than the sum of its parts? My lab studies the cognitive capacities and community dynamics that make human collaboration possible. We approach collaboration at two levels of analysis. Zooming in, our work seeks to understand how individuals navigate collaborations—that is, how individuals learn about their collaborators, share knowledge with one another, and divide labor. Zooming out, our work examines how community-wide dynamics contribute to the success of collaborations. We draw on multiple methods, including behavioral studies with children and adults, Bayesian cognitive models, functional neuroimaging, and analyses of large, naturalistic datasets.

  • Vélez, N., Wu, C.M.*, Gershman, S.J., & Schulz, E.* (under review). The rise and fall of technological development in virtual communities.
  •  Vélez, N., Chen, A. M., Burke, T., Cushman, F., & Gershman, S. J. (2023). Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners' beliefs. PNAS.
  • Vélez, N., Christian, B., Hardy, M., Thompson, B. D., & Griffiths, T. L. (2023). How do humans overcome individual computational limitations by working together?. Cognitive Science.
  • Vélez, N., & Gweon, H. (2021). Learning from other minds: An optimistic critique of reinforcement learning models of social learning. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.

Updated Oct 2025