People at the Centre
Find out more about the team behind the CCD!
Faculty and Students

Darko Odic,
Associate Professor
darko.odic@psych.ubc.ca
Dr. Darko Odic, Director (CV)
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
Email: darko.odic@psych.ubc.ca
Personal Website: odic.psych.ubc.ca

Denitza Dramkin,
Graduate Student,
ddramkin@psych.ubc.ca
Denitza Dramkin, Graduate Student
Humans are remarkably intuitive. Even before we learn to count or measure, we can rapidly judge which plate has more cookies on it or which slice of cake is bigger. How does the acquisition of language enrich and change our abilities to reason about the world around us? Denitza explores this puzzle by examining the interface between language and perception, including the mechanisms that support children's abilities to attach number words to intuitive perceptual magnitudes. She also explores how we reconcile competing visual and linguistic cues, and the role of language in guiding attention to a subset of possible mental representations.
Email: ddramkin@psych.ubc.ca
Personal Website: ddramkin.wixsite.com/denitzapdramkin

Eloise West,
Graduate Student,
ewest@psych.ubc.ca
Eloise West, Graduate Student
Development doesn’t happen in isolation - children simultaneously learn many skills. For example, in just a few months, a crawling, babbling infant becomes an independent, walking, talking toddler. Eloise is interested in how different areas of change interrelate: does one ability forge the way for another? When and how does new knowledge alter our behavior? Her recent work explores how children’s developing understanding of language interfaces with other areas of cognition, including attention, perception, mental representation, metacognition, confidence, and certainty.
Email: ewest@psych.ubc.ca

Maria Brandao,
Graduate Student,
mbrandao@psych.ubc.ca
Maria Brandao, Graduate Student
Noticing mistakes is a very important step when we are learning new things. This way, they can be evaluated and corrected. While learning math, catching errors can be an especially hard task for children. How can they know if an answer is correct when there is an infinite number of possibilities? Maria is interested in understanding how children generate, test, and revise predictions in math using their intuitive number sense, an ability that every child is born with. Her research will also explore how children with math-specific learning disabilities are affected in this process and how different kinds of cognitive intervention can be used to improve their math abilities.
Email: mbrandao@psych.ubc.ca

Miranda Long,
Graduate Student,
mlong@psych.ubc.ca
Miranda Long, Graduate Student
How do we learn something new? Miranda investigates this question by exploring the underlying learning mechanisms by which humans acquire new knowledge. In much of her work, Miranda explores how visual and auditory regularities of the environmental input may influence the learning of various concepts, including the acquisition of early nouns to the development of more abstract concepts like number. Miranda’s current work utilizes deep neural network models and predictions derived of such models to explore the emergence and development of our intuitive sense of number (i.e., the Approximate Number System). Additionally, Miranda is curious as to how these approximate representations of number change throughout human development and with formal mathematical education.
Email: mlong@psych.ubc.ca
Staff and Research Assistants
Research Coordinator

Ayshe Ozlu,
Coordinator,
ccd.coordinator@ubc.ca
Ayshe Ozlu, Research Coordinator
Ayshe is responsible for all day-to-day aspects of the Centre, including calling parents, running studies, and coordinating all of the research assistants. If you are ever in doubt of who to contact, contact Ayshe!
Email: ccd.coordinator@ubc.ca
Current Research Assistants
Aimee Lutrin
Visiting Graduate Student

Alice Erchov
Research Assistant

Anjali Chakravarti
Research Assistant

Ashley Choo
Research Assistant

Casey Cooper
Research Assistant

Divya Gupta
Research Assistant

Eddie Kim
Research Assistant

Heyli Arcese
Research Assistant

Isha Sacheti
Research Assistant

Jessica Li
Research Assistant

Jovita Wiyogo
Research Assistant

Karin Kermani
Research Assistant

Kate Rho
Research Assistant

Mahnoor Faisal
Research Assistant

Martyna Siwocha
Research Assistant

Matthew Tsui
Research Assistant

Samin Alighanadi
Research Assistant

Somi Lim
Research Assistant

Steffi Lau
Research Assistant

Stephanie Chen
Research Assistant

Stephanie Markovic
Research Assistant

Tanya Pardiwala
Research Assistant

Tasmia Jahan
Research Assistant

Vaidehi Asawa
Research Assistant

Alumni

Carolyn Baer,
Graduate Student (2015 - 2020),
cebaer@psych.ubc.ca
Carolyn Baer, Graduate Student (2015 - 2020)
Carolyn was in the lab from 2015 - 2020, and studied how children learn about the world around them and act as social agents, including how children reason about their own confidence, and whether this relates to their ability to evaluate others. Archeologists in the year 3020 are still digging up Carolyn's to-do post-it notes from the earth, trying to decypher their mythical powers of productivity.
Email: cebaer@psych.ubc.ca
Personal Website: cebaer.wix.com/carolyn-baer
Cory Bonn, Post-Doc (2018 - 2020)
Cory was in the lab from 2018 - 2020, working on projects investigating the processes that give rise to our visual sense of number, as well as developing novel statistical techniques (through the Data Science Initiative) for missing data in developmental psychology. After he left, the lab's collective knowledge of Python dropped by around 100% for a few months.
Personal Website: corydbonn.github.io/
Interested in Joining the Centre?
We are always looking for talented individuals to join our research team!
If you are interested in applying to be a graduate student or post-doc, please contact Dr. Odic directly.
If you'd like to volunteer in the lab as a Research Assistant, please email us at ccd.joinus@ubc.ca! Somebody from the lab will email you back once we have open slots. Please keep in mind that we can only accept UBC students as volunteers in our lab.