Laurie Santos [personal webpage] [cv] Laurie is the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory. She received her A.B. in Psychology and Biology from Harvard University in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard in 2003. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology.

Laurie is the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory. She received her A.B. in Psychology and Biology from Harvard University in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard in 2003. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology.

Faculty

Lab Manager

Melissa Baranay

Melissa graduated from Yale University in 2011 with a degree in Psychology. She worked in the CapLab for two years as an undergraduate.

Primary Graduate Students

Other Graduate Affiliates

Venkat Lakshminarayanan

Venkat investigates whether monkeys share our economic biases. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 2004 and is currently a graduate student in the Department of Psychology.

Kelly Hughes

Kelly is interested in individual differences in monkey risk-taking. She is currently a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Yale working jointly with Dr. David Watts.

Jennifer Barnes

Jen received her B.A. from Yale in 2006. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship, she earned her M.A.at the University of Cambridge. Jen has also just finished her second book and is currently a graduate student in the Department of Psychology.

Mark Sheskin

Mark graduated from the University of Miami in 2007 with a BS in Neuroscience and a BA in Philosophy and Theatre. His research interests are the intersection of philosophy and psychology, particularly in the are of moral judgements. In CapLab, he is investigating fairness behavior in monkeys.

Kristi Leimgruber

Kristi did her undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin- Madison where she double- majored in Zoology and Biological Aspects of Conservation. Before coming to Yale, she spent 3 years working at the Living Links Center in Atlanta with Dr. Frans de Waal. She is interested in the evolutionary roots of prosocial behaviors.

Post-Docs

Ellen Furlong

Ellen received her B.A. in math from Transylvania University and her PhD in psychology from Ohio State University. She is interested in exploring the roots of economic decision-making.

April Ruiz

April earned a B.A. in cognitive science from Yale in 2005. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of St Andrews, where she worked with Dr. Richard Byrne and Dr. Juan Carlos Gomez. April has returned to Caplab as a postdoctoral associate and is exploring social cognition in rhesus macaques.

Other Affiliates

Kirk Manson

Kirk received his B.S. from Ohio State University in 2005 and his M.A. at the University of Chicago in 2008. He is currently interested in how the unconscious mind uses information from social interactions and the environment to guide behavior and make decisions, using both comparative methods and cognitive neuroscience with Ifat Levy at the Yale School of Medicine

Alex Shaw

Alex is currently a graduate student in psychology at Yale University and is interested in how human beings navigate the complex social world by tracking others’ reputation and by signaling to others.

Lindsey Drayton

Lindsey studied psychology and primatology as an undergraduate at Duke. Prior to attending Yale, she worked at Zoo Atlanta studying great ape cognition and behavior. She is interested in social decision-making in non-human primates in order to better understand the innate biases which play a role in human moral judgements.