Hi, I’m Mert!
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University with a Ph.D. in Cognition and Perception from New York University. My research spans developmental psychology and cognitive science, with a focus on how children and adults learn, reason, and generate explanations. In particular, I study how violations of expectation shape learning and belief revision, and how explanations influence what people learn and how they update their intuitive theories.
My research has been published in journals including PNAS, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Language Learning and Development, and Current Psychology, and presented at international conferences such as SRCD and CogSci. I also collaborate on interdisciplinary projects bridging psychology and artificial intelligence, investigating how large language models reason, explain, persuade, and differ from human cognition. More broadly, I am interested in using behavioral and computational approaches to understand the mechanisms underlying explanation, expectation violation, and learning across development.
I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Educational Sciences from Boğaziçi University and a Master of Arts in Psychology from Koç University.