Director
Dr. Rose Scott
Professor
Psychological Sciences
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Social Sciences and Management Building 310B
Office Phone: (209) 228-4362
Email: rscott@ucmerced.edu
I am interested in the development of social cognition in early childhood. Much of my work in this area focuses on the development of psychological reasoning or 'theory of mind': the ability to reason about the mental states (e.g., goals, preferences, thoughts, and feelings) that drive people's behavior. I am interested in when children develop the ability to represent and reason about different types of mental states, how this develops across early childhood, and the factors that contribute to this development. For instance, how does the language input that children receive from their parents, and their own developing language skills, contribute to early psychological reasoning? And does this vary based on environmental factors, such as family socioeconomic status? I also have a second line of work examining children's understanding of social categories in their environment such as race, ethnicity, and social status. This work examines the beliefs children hold about these categories and the environmental factors that contribute to these beliefs, as well as how these beliefs shape children's behavior, such as who they trust as teachers and social partners.
Graduate Students
Jeanie Cox
I am a first-year graduate student studying Developmental Psychology. I graduated from Whittier College in 2022 with a B.A. in Psychology. My research interests pertain to how children themselves serve as teachers, the ways in which children teach and learn from one another, and how culture shapes children’s teaching behaviors.
Paloma Iñiguez
I am a fourth-year graduate student studying developmental psychology. I graduated from UC Riverside in 2019 with a B.A. in Psychology. My research interests pertain to how children learn various types of causal information with varied answers from familiar and unfamiliar adults.
Gabriel Nguyentran
I am a fourth-year doctoral student studying Developmental Psychology. I graduated from UC Merced in 2020 with a B.S. in Cognitive Science and a minor in Psychology. I also received a M.S. in Psychology from Villanova University. My research interests pertain to how everyday parent-child interactions can shape social-cognitive development, particularly in regard to the perception of social categories.
Lab Alumni
John Bunce
Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences, 2017, University of California Merced
Current Position: Assistant Professor, CSU East Bay
My primary research interest is language acquisition especially as it applies children’s early word learning. My current research focuses on how perceptual, social, and linguistic information sources impacts children’s cross-situational word learning.
Maritza Miramontes
B.A. in Psychology, 2018, University of California Merced
Current Position: PhD student in Developmental Psychology, University of California Davis
I graduated from UC Merced in 2018 with a B.A. in Psychology and minors in Spanish and Cognitive Science. As an undergraduate, I worked in Dr. Alex Main’s Family Development lab as a research assistant and then as a lab coordinator. After graduating, I worked as a behavior technician until becoming a research coordinator for Dr. Rose Scott. I want to pursue my doctorate in Developmental Psychology. My interests are in the influence of cultural, social, and environmental factors on adolescent emotional development and parent-adolescent interactions.
Megan Pronovost
Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences, 2019, University of California Merced
Current Position: Assistant Professor, CSU Fresno
My program of research examines the origins and nature of stereotyping and prejudice in infancy, the features that infants expect social groups to share, and possible environmental influences on early social-group reasoning.
Erin Roby
Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences, 2017, University of California Merced
Current Position: Assistant Professor, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
Broadly, my research investigates the factors that contribute to social cognitive development across the lifespan. More specifically, my research focuses on how particular social experiences, such as hearing and using mental-state language, relate to false-belief understanding. I am particularly interested in examining these relationships during the first years of life, and also during adulthood. In future work, I plan to broaden the focus of my research to examine how other social contexts relate to social cognitive development, and how the relationship between social experiences and false-belief understanding might vary across income level, culture, and language background.
James Sullivan
Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences, 2025, University of California Merced
Current Position: Adjunct faculty, Merced Community College
My research interests pertain to how socioeconomic status and other social factors influence parent-child interactions and how these interactions impact socio-cognitive outcomes such as false-belief understanding.
Kailee Zhu
Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences, 2024, University of California Merced
Current Position: Assistant Teaching Professor, Arizona State University.
I graduated from the University of California, Irvine in 2015 with a B.A. in Psychology and from Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2018 with a M.Ed in Human Development and Psychology. I am interested in how children and adults think of social categories (ethnicity, socioeconomic status) and how their own background shapes their beliefs.