Mohit Mukherji

Links
mohit.mukherji@nyu.edu
CV (accurate as of February 2026)
Google scholar

I am a PhD student in the Cognition & Perception program at NYU. I work primarily with Molly Dillon and Marjorie Rhodes. I started my PhD in 2022. Before that, I was at Temple University, where I studied Philosophy and Psychology, and worked as a research assistant with Tim Shipley in the Research in Spatial Cognition (RISC) lab.

I am broadly interested in the development of language and thought. In particular, I'm interested in how language interfaces with belief formation and with core systems of representing agents, objects, and places.

Projects

For a full list of papers, please see my Google Scholar page.

One of my projects with Molly Dillon finds that adults and older children associate different gaze directions (straight-ahead vs averted gaze) with language that encodes agency or phenomenal experience in others' mental states. Another project probes what aspects of nonverbal action understanding adults and children use to learn the meanings of novel words. For example, infants are sensitive to the efficiency, object-directedness, and paths of others' actions. What subset of this information do children and adults use to learn the meanings of new verbs?

Another project with Marjorie Rhodes and Eric Mandelbaum asks how children form beliefs from testimony. Previous work has found that, when placed under cognitive load, adults misremember denied statements as true more often than they misremembered confirmed statements as false. We are interested in the development of this phenomena as a window into the cognitive mechanisms that explain it.