

About
The 2025 NSF Workshop on Deconstructing the Universal Mind will be held in person over two days, Thursday, June 12th, 2025 and Friday, June 13th, 2025 at the National Science Foundation located on 2415 Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia, 22314. Remote participation will also be available.
The goal of the workshop is to discuss cross-disciplinary approaches to universality and variability in the behavioral, neural, and cognitive sciences. Of particular interest is how to balance theory-building with situated models of development and behavior, and in the practical and methodological obstacles to making progress on these questions. Workshop outcomes could generate future funding possibilities at NSF on this topic.
The workshop will be organized around symposia featuring ~20 minute talks, but we will also schedule in substantial amounts of non-webcast discussion time.
Workshop Co-chairs


Workshop Speakers

Karen Adolph
New York University

Lucia Alcala
California State University

Clark Barrett
UCLA

Damian Blasi
Pompeu Fabra University

Stephanie Carlson
University of Minnesota

Marisa Casillas
The University of Chicago

Nicholas Coles
University of Florida

Alex Cristia
École Normale Supérieure

Jacob Foster
Indiana University

Richard Futrell
UC Irvine

Michele Gelfand
Stanford University

Tom Griffiths
Princeton University

Joe Henrich
Harvard University

Matthew Jukes
RTI International

Evan Kidd
Australian National University

Shinobu Kitayama
University of Michigan

Jen Lansford
Duke University

Victoria Leong
Nanyang Technological University

Casey Lew-Williams
Princeton University

Sebastian Lipina
UNA, CEMIC-CONICET

Asifa Majid
Oxford University

Cristina Moya
UC Davis

Jelena Obradovic
Stanford University

Geoffrey Saxe
UC Berkeley

Iveta Silova
Arizona State University

Manvir Singh
UC Davis

Cathie Tamis-Lemonda
New York University

Julian Thayer
UC Irvine

Felix Warneken
University of Michigan

Phil Zelazo
University of Minnesota