Mohit Mukherji

Links
mohit.mukherji@nyu.edu
CV
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 current projects with Molly Dillon 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, and why?

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.

Teaching

I served as course assistant for Lab in Developmental Psychology (Spring 2023), taught by Molly Dillon, and for Developmental Psychology (Spring 2026), taught by Karen Adolph.

I have also taught undergraduate Developmental Psychology (Summers 2025 and 2026) with an emphasis on topics in cognitive and conceptual development.