Aarthi Popat

I am a PhD student in the Psychology Department at Yale University, advised by Julia Leonard (Leonard Learning Lab) and Yarrow Dunham (Social Cognitive Development Lab).

My research focuses on how children reason about competence and ability in the context of real-world stereotypes and historic marginalization. In particular, I study the cognitive mechanisms (e.g., statistical reasoning, causal reasoning) underlying these inferences across the lifespan.

Before Yale, I worked as a lab manager at UCSD (with Caren Walker at the Early Learning and Cognition Lab). I earned my B.A. from Stanford in 2021, where I completed my honors thesis with Ellen Markman (Markman Lab).