Alexandra Carstensen is an assistant professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. She is interested broadly in how humans abstract away from the sensory information they receive about the world to create, structure and communicate higher-level representations. To improve understanding of these processes, her research explores consistency and variation in cognition over development across diverse languages and cultures. She completed her doctorate in psychology at U.C. Berkeley and research fellowships at Stanford University, University of California, San Diego and the Max PIanck Institute for Psycholinguistics.