Kexin (Kathy) Que 阙可鑫
PhD student at Northwestern University
Contact:
kexinque[AT]u.northwestern.edu
Google Scholar
Github
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology,
Cognitive Science Program,
Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences,
Northwestern University
I am a second-year graduate student in The Project on Children’s Thinking, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be advised by Professor Dedre Gentner. My research focuses on analogical reasoning and its role in learning relational concepts, such as numbers and mathematics. I am also broadly interested in language and cognition, and I find cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies particularly insightful for exploring these areas.
Before joining Northwestern, I was a research assistant at Professor Stella Christie’s Child Cognition Lab, part of the Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence at Tsinghua University. There, I worked with graduate student Yang Gao on projects related to analogy generation and collaborated with Professor Yu Zhang (now at California State University, San Marcos) and Professor Susan Levine at Uchicago on a project examining how culture influences children’s beliefs about math learning. Additionally, I collaborated with Dr. Akshita Srinivasan and Dr. Simge Topaloglu from Harvard University on a cross-linguistic study involving five languages to investigate how language affects children’s number learning.
Prior to that, I took a gap year during my undergraduate studies at the University of Bath to work as a research assistant at the Lab for Developmental Studies at Harvard University, under the supervision of Professor Liz Spelke. With the mentorship of Professor Shari Liu, who was a graduate student there at the time, I conducted my undergraduate dissertation on how adults and children reason about probability and reward when understanding others’ actions. I am particularly grateful to Shari, who ignited my passion for developmental research and has been a role model in guiding me toward conducting scientific research.
In my leisure time, I enjoy singing, rock climbing, and playing board games that involve strategy, reasoning, and teamwork, such as Avalon. I’m also a big fan (and an unofficial promoter) of Cambio and 24 Points.
Special thanks to Zhanhao for taking the profile picture and building the website.