Karima Elgamal

Welcome!

I’m Karima Elgamal, a third-year Ph.D. student in Developmental Science at Boston University, where I work with Dr. Deborah Kelemen in the Child Cognition Lab. My research examines how children use explanations to learn, reason, and build an understanding of the world around them. I am particularly interested in how the content, structure, and level of detail of explanations shape what children prefer, remember, generalize, and ultimately learn.

My current work investigates how different forms of explanation, including mechanistic, teleological, and circular explanations, influence children’s explanatory preferences and their own production of explanations. More broadly, I am interested in how exposure to explanatory information shapes learning and conceptual change across both children and adults. I also collaborate with researchers on work examining how children naturally interact with, reason about, and learn from artificial intelligence systems, extending my interests in explanation and learning to emerging human-AI interactions.

Before coming to BU, I earned my M.A. in Psychological Sciences and B.A. in Psychology, with a minor in Cognitive Science, from Montclair State University, where I worked with Dr. Laura Lakusta in the Cognitive and Language Development Lab. My prior research examined how children and adults use language to represent spatial relationships and mechanical support, bringing together questions from cognitive development, language, and spatial reasoning.

Across my research, I combine experimental methods, qualitative and quantitative behavioral data, developmental theory, and statistical modeling in R to investigate how people learn from and reason with information. I am especially interested in translating these approaches to questions at the intersection of cognitive science, behavioral research, and human-AI interaction.

My research has been supported by multiple awards, including the Boston University Dean’s Fellowship and the American Psychological Foundation’s Sharon Stephens Brehm Scholarship, and has been presented at conferences including CogSci, BUCLD, the Cognitive Development Society (CDS), and the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD).