Judith Ellen Fan

I direct the Cognitive Tools Lab (https://cogtoolslab.github.io/) at Stanford University. Our lab aims to reverse engineer the human cognitive toolkit—in particular, how people use physical representations of thought to learn, communicate, and solve problems. Toward this end, we use a combination of approaches from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to achieve deeper understanding of quintessentially human ways of thinking and imagining. Our broader goal is to leverage such scientific understanding of human cognition to guide the development of technologies that augment human agency and creativity.