About Me

Hello! My name is Anjie Cao (Chinese:曹安洁; Pinyin: cáo ān jié). I am a third year Psychology Ph.D student at Stanford working with Mike Frank in the Language and Cognition Lab. I am broadly interested in using data-driven approaches to evaluate and understand experimental methods used in psychology research, with a focus on developmental psychology.

In my first line of research, I aim to understand the underlying mechanisms behind the looking time paradigm which is prevalent in infant research. This work combines behavioral experiments with computational modeling to shed light on how humans allocate visual attention throughout developmental trajectories. In my second line of research, I use meta-analytical methods to quantitatively evaluate the methodological factors’ impact on the effect being measured. Finally, I am interested in examining research methods across cultures. I have worked on a project that aims to understand the replicability of classic cultural psychology findings in an online setting.

Before Stanford, I was an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, where I studied cognitive science and philosophy. My undergraduate research was primarily on language acquisition in infancy and early childhood. I worked in Infant Language and Learning Lab (PI: Erik Thiessen) and Infant Cognition Lab (PI: David Rakison). I was born and raised in Beijing, China and I graduated from RDFZ in 2016.

For a more complete record of my academic journey, here is my CV.