Her research interests lie at the intersection of social cognition and imagination. She studies how actors participate in and create fictional worlds onstage, the effects of such intense and prolonged engagement on the actor’s social cognitive abilities, and how young children understand and react to watching fictional worlds both as audience members and when engaging in their own role play. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Psychological Foundation, and the Department of Homeland Security, and she has won awards from Society for Research in Child Development, American Psychological Association, and International Association for the Empirical Study of Literature.