Catherine A. Holland

My name is Catherine Holland and I am a graduate student with Jonathan Phillips in the Cognitive Science Department. My research on modal cognition (i.e. how we reason about possibilities) falls at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and computer science. I study high-level cognition -including decision-making, causal reasoning, and theory of mind - by better understanding how we simulate non-actual possibilities. For example, when we make decisions we often simulate different possible actions or outcomes; when making causal judgments we simulate counterfactual possibilities, and when reasoning about others' minds we simulate their worldview. I earned my BS in Psychological Neuroscience at Yale in 2016 and worked as a lab manager at  Harvard Moral Psychology Research Lab, Harvard Greene Lab, and MIT Neuroeconomics Lab before starting my PhD at Dartmouth.