My work is motivated by the observation that human cognition doesn’t happen in a vacuum: it often differs between people, over time, and across contexts. I am particularly interested in systematic variation across contexts: cases where contextual features impact cognitive processing by eliciting different cognitive processes, even within the same individual. To investigate these questions, I use behavioral experiments, mathematical models, and a developmental perspective with infants, children, and adults. This approach allows for developing and quantitatively testing more complete cognitive theories that can speak to causal mechanisms, while also providing key insights that can be leveraged to improve children and adults’ learning and behavior.