Eleanor B. Schille-Hudson

I am a Postdoctoral Research Scientist working with Tanya Luhrmann in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science & Cognitive Psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington. My faculty advisors were David Landy (now at Netflix) and Rob Goldstone

My research asks: How do people think about and understand things they cannot see (or access with their senses)? I think about the way people rely on their priors, habituated behaviors, social networks, and cultural context to make sense of the world around them, seen and unseen. Big picture, I am trying to connect the dots between culture and perceptual learning. I employ a combination of behavioral studies, computational modeling, and theoretical analysis

Please feel free to reach out! You can contact me by emailing: erbsh(at)stanford(dot)edu



(the "Schille" in Schille-Hudson is pronounced 'shill-ee')

News

October 15, 2024: My short review of Vosniadou & Brewer's amazing article "Mental models of the earth: a study of conceptual change in childhood" was published online today in Nature Psych Reviews!

October 2024:  I visited Yale to give a talk on the relationship between prayer practice and reports of spiritual experience at the Belief, Learning, & Memory Lab and then zipped down to Rutgers for a workshop with the Perceiving Divine Presences group.

September 15-20 2024: I am at the Esalen Institute, attending a workshop hosted by their Center for Theory and Research, titled "Taxonomies of the Unseen."

Sept 11-14 2024: I am in Lisbon, attending the ECHR & ICHR 2024 Meetings. I presented on cross-cultural rates of spiritual experience. 

July 2024: I presented a poster on the rates of different spiritual experiences around the world and what that can tell us about the mind at CogSci 2024.

June 2024: I attended SPP's 50th annual conference in my hometown of West Lafayette, IN 

February 2024: My paper Prayer as collaborative solving was published in Religion, Brain & Behavior.

October 2023: I gave a virtual talk at Tania Lombrozo's Concepts and Cognition Lab meeting on the ways people use prayer as a problem solving strategy.

June 2023: I attended my first SPP conference in Pittsburgh!

April 2023: I received the Indiana University Cognitive Science Program Award for Outstanding Dissertations!

January 2023: I have started an exciting postdoc working with the inimitable Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford, working on the Templeton-funded Perceiving Divine Presences project.

December 2022: I defended my dissertation (virtually, with the distinction of being the best-attended dissertation defense Rob Goldstone has ever seen). All was well and I graduated :)