Michael Osfeld

Michael is a doctoral student in the Mayer lab and Cognitive Adaptation Lab (lead by David Pietraszewski) studying evolutionary educational psychology: an approach to educational psychology which leverages the mind's functional architecture to better understand topics of educational relevance. In the Mayer lab, Michael explores topics such as how our evolved psychology for social status shapes patterns of student participation, and how interest works as a mechanistic cognitive system. He is also interested in creating tools for researchers, such as the Illusion Classroom (software for studying socioemotional educational phenomena which closes the laboratory-field research gap) and the Transmission Chainer (software which reduces the complexity of conducting large scale transmission chain studies).