Congrats to Andrei!
June 25, 2026
Congratulations to Andrei Amatuni for successfully defending his dissertation proposal!
Andrei’s dissertation examines how people learn the hidden structure of experience and use that knowledge to make flexible inferences in new situations. His work focuses on development, asking how children, adolescents, and adults move from more perceptually anchored learning toward more abstract, conceptual, and relational representations.
Across his dissertation, Andrei is addressing these questions in two core domains. One line of work examines memory-guided inference, testing how learners use prior experience to reason about hidden causes and novel situations. Another line of work focuses on naturalistic event cognition, asking how people segment, organize, and remember continuous real-world experiences.
A major strength of Andrei’s work is how it crosses levels of analysis. His dissertation integrates behavioral experiments, computational modeling, AI-derived measures of event and environmental structure, and neuroimaging to ask how developing minds and brains build increasingly flexible representations of experience.
We look forward to seeing how this work unfolds over the next phase of the dissertation! Many thanks to Andrei’s committee members—Jess Church-Lang, Alex Huth, and Jacqui Woolley—for their thoughtful feedback and guidance.
Congratulations, Andrei!
