Denise Cummins, Ph.D.

Dr. Denise Dellarosa Cummins is research psychologist and author. She has held faculty and research positions at Yale University, the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the Center for Adaptive Behavior at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She is a respected cognitive scientist who has authored numerous scientific articles, and is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She also gives invited talks about her research at universities and popular venues all over the world. In her Psychology Today blog, she writes about what she and other cognitive scientists are discovering about the way people think, solve problems, and make decisions. Her research interests include the evolution and development of higher cognition in artificial and biological systems. Her experimental investigations work focus on Causal Cognition, Social Cognition, and Moral Cognition. The aim of this research is investigating and explaining characteristics of higher cognition that emerge early in development, persist into adulthood, and are prefigured in the cognition of non-human animals.