The Cognitive Tools Lab is directed by Prof. Judith Fan and located in the Stanford Department of Psychology.

Our lab employs converging approaches from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to reverse engineer the human cognitive toolkit, especially how people use physical representations of thought — such as sketches and prototypes — to learn, communicate, and solve problems.

One of our central goals is to connect fundamental questions about human cognition to the project of equipping more people with the intellectual skills that will help them throughout their lives. Here is a talk Judy Fan gave at the 2025 TEDAI conference laying out this mission, entitled “How the human mind will coevolve with AI”. An example of a project aligned with this mission is Nightingale Labs, a multidisciplinary effort to advance the science of how people learn to reason about data (and thus, related concepts like measurement, inference, and uncertainty) in authentic educational environments.

Our work has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, Stanford Accelerator for Learning, Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning, Adobe Research, and Autodesk Research.