Adena Schachner

Adena Schachner received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale University, a Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University, and did post-doctoral research at Boston University before joining UC San Diego as an Assistant Professor of Psychology in 2016. In 2017, she received the Rising Star Award, recognizing outstanding early-career psychological scientists, from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusions (EDI) Fellowship from the Center for Faculty Diversity and Equity at UC San Diego. Dr. Schachner's research explores how children and adults reason about the social world, with a particular focus on links between music and social cognition. How do we use mental states (like intentions, goals and preferences) to explain others’ actions, and to understand the artifacts that people own and create? She employ a variety of experimental methodologies, including looking time with infants, computational modeling, and behavioral methods with children and adults, both in the lab and around the world via the internet.