The Cognitive Tools Lab is directed by Prof. Judith Fan and currently located in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology. In July 2023, the lab will be moving to the Stanford Department of Psychology. During this transition, the lab will maintain a presence at UC San Diego while several of our lab members continue their graduate studies.

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.