Our social environment shapes our learning from the moment we are born. Children not only have inductive biases that shape their early learning from themselves and others, but our beliefs about social categories are shaped by the kinds of people we encounter and the kinds of experiences we have. My work seeks to understand how cognitive factors, such as how we seek out information actively and integrate information from others, as well as emergent characteristics of our environments, such as social coordination, can serve as a powerful source of information--but also make us potentially prone to phenomena such as belief divergence, or essentializing and stereotyping of social categories.
Note: Asterisks represent equal contribution between authors. Italics represent undergraduate mentee at time of research.
Gelpí, R. A., Tang, Y., Jackson, E. C., & Cunningham, W. A. (under review). Stereotypic expectations entrench unequal conventions across generations in deep multi-agent reinforcement learning. arXiv:2410.01763 [cs.MA]
Gelpí, R. A., Whalen, A., Griffiths, T. L., Xu, F., & Buchsbaum, D. (under revision). Can children and adults balance majority size with information quality in learning from preferences? https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pa3g4
Gelpí, R. A., Otsubo, K., Whalen, A., & Buchsbaum, D. (under revision). Investigating sensitivity to shared information and personal experience in children’s use of majority information. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7ms3p
Zhou, C., Gelpí, R. A., Lucas, C. G. & Buchsbaum, D. (2024). Can children learn functional relations through active information sampling? In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 229–236).
Gelpí, R. A., & Buchsbaum, D. (2024). Children as cultural explorers: How imitation, pedagogy, and selective trust prepare children for learning in the cultural niche. In R. Kendal, J. Tehrani, & J. Kendal (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198869252.013.19
Blackburn, A. M., Han, H., Jeftić, A., Stöckli, S., Gelpí, R. A., Acosta-Ortiz, A. M., Travaglino, G. A., Alvarado, R., Lacko, D., Milfont, T. L., Chrona, S., Griffin, S. M., Tamayo-Aguledo, W., Lee, Y., & Vestergren, S. (2023). Long-term predictors of compliance with COVID-19 guidelines across countries: The role of social norms, trust, stress, demographic factors, and moral values. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0001268
Blackburn, A. N.*, Han, H.*, Gelpí, R. A., Stöckli, S., Jeftic, A., Ch'ng, B., Koszałkowska, K., Lacko, D., Milfont, T. L., Lee, Y., The COVIDiSTRESS II Consortium, & Vestergren, S. (2023). Mediation analysis of conspiratorial thinking and anti-expert sentiments on vaccine willingness. Health Psychology, 42(4), 235–246. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0001268
Tang, Y.*, Gelpí, R. A.*, & Cunningham, W. A. (2023). Unequal norms emerge under coordination uncertainty in multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 555–561).
Gelpí, R. A., Zhou, C., Lucas, C. G., & Buchsbaum, D. (2023). Characterizing shifts in strategy in active function learning. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2377–2383)
Gelpí, R. A., Allidina, S., Hoyer, D., & Cunningham, W. A. (2022). The labelled container: Conceptual development of social group representations. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e108. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X21001412
Blackburn, A. M., Vestergren, S., & The COVIDiSTRESS II Consortium (including Gelpí, R. A.). (2022). COVIDiSTRESS diverse dataset on psychological and behavioural outcomes one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientific Data, 9, 331. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01383-6
Rachev, N. R.*, Han, H.*, Lacko, D.*, Gelpí, R. A.*, Yamada, Y., & Lieberoth, A. (2021). Replicating the “Disease” framing paradigm during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic: A study of stress, worry, trust, and choice under risk. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257151
Prystawski, B., Gelpí, R. A., Lucas, C. G., & Buchsbaum, D. (2021). Modelling recognition in human puzzle solving. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1907–1913).
Gelpí, R. A., Saxena, N., Lifchits, G., Buchsbaum, D. & Lucas, C. G. (2021). Sampling heuristics for active function learning. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (pp. 80–86).
Lieberoth, A., Lin, S.-Y., Stöckli, S., Han, H., Kowal, M., Gelpí, R. A., Chrona, S., Tran, T. P., Jeftic, A., Rasmussen, J., Cakal, H., Milfont, T. L., & The COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey Consortium (2021). Stress and worry in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic: Relationships to trust and compliance with preventive measures across 48 countries. Royal Society Open Science, 8, 200589. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200589
Yamada, Y., Ćepulić, D. B., Coll-Martín, T., Debove, S., Gautreau, G., Han, H., Rasmussen, J., Tran, T. P., Travaglino, G. A., The COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey Consortium (including Gelpí, R. A.), & Lieberoth, A. (2021). COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey dataset on psychological and behavioural consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. Scientific Data, 8, 3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00784-9
Gelpí, R. A., Cunningham, W. A., & Buchsbaum, D. (2020). Belief as a non-epistemic adaptive benefit. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X19002206
Gelpí, R. A., Prystawski, B., Lucas, C. G., & Buchsbaum, D. (2020). Incremental hypothesis revision in causal reasoning across development. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 974–980).
Durgin, F. H., & Gelpí, R. A. (2017). When do vehicles of similes become figurative? Gaze patterns show that similes and metaphors are initially processed differently. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1967–1972).
