Stephanie DenisonView profile
Associate Professor
Stephanie Denison is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Undergraduate Affairs at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on developmental psychology, particularly how children develop reasoning abilities related to probability, counterfactual thinking, and social cognition. Her work explores topics such as causal attribution, sunk cost fallacy, social network inference, and decision-making strategies in children. She has published extensively on probabilistic reasoning in infants and preschoolers, demonstrating how young children use statistical information to form beliefs about the world. Her recent studies investigate children's understanding of counterfactual scenarios (e.g., 'What if I had done something differently?'), their ability to infer emotions based on probabilistic outcomes, and their reasoning about social relationships through mutual connections. Denison also examines how children integrate physical constraints and emotional factors into their decision-making processes. Her contributions span cognitive development, philosophy of mind, and educational psychology, with a strong emphasis on bridging theoretical models with empirical findings from developmental research.










