# The people behind the work. Meet the founder, coordinator, and research collaborators at Curtainplate Laboratories. ## Meet our founder & director ### Burcu Ünlütabak **Founder & Lab Director** Burcu Ünlütabak founded the lab and continues to lead its research. Her work is rooted in developmental psychology: how learning, language, and social understanding take shape. Questions, conversation, family, and culture connect that foundation to research with children, adults, and artificial agents. She established the Curiosity and Learning Lab at Nuh Naci Yazgan University and continued it at Yeditepe University, where she led the TÜBİTAK 3501 project on children’s questions to people and voice assistants. Today, as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the American University of Sharjah, she leads the lab’s work on development, learning, and social understanding, including research on artificial agents. At Boğaziçi University, she studied English Language and Literature and earned an MA in Developmental Psychology. Her master’s thesis examined how Turkish preschoolers track characters in stories and understand what those characters know or believe. She completed her PhD at Lehigh University in 2018, where she studied how preschoolers from different socioeconomic backgrounds ask questions. She then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Science of Learning Institute. [AUS faculty profile](https://www.aus.edu/faculty/burcu-unlutabak) · [Lab history](/about/history.md) · [Academic record](https://yeditepe.edu.tr/en/academic-staff/2897) · [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1299-1177) · [Related research](/research/related-work.md) ## Working together Our team brings together developmental psychology, experimental methods, and research software. ### Onur Bal **Lab Coordinator** Onur Bal coordinates the lab’s studies and the software that supports them. A clinical psychologist and researcher, he connects experimental methods with data collection and analysis. His work includes literary readership and mentalisation, human–AI interaction, and the evaluation of language models. He earned bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and English Language and Literature at Yeditepe University. He also completed an MA in Clinical Psychology there. His thesis, supervised by Burcu Ünlütabak, examined how literary reading relates to empathy and mentalisation. As a research assistant on the TÜBİTAK 3501 project, he helped run studies with children, built the Wizard-of-Oz voice assistant interface, and set up workflows for transcription, coding, and analysis. The social robot paper credits him with helping collect and prepare data and check agreement between coders. He also built the experiment pipeline for the Turkish–English language model study and the platform for the AI trust study. [Research CV](https://onurbal.com/en/about/) · [Master’s thesis](https://onurbal.com/en/academics/thesis/) · [Theory of mind study](/research/theory-of-mind.md) · [AI trust study](/research/ai-trust.md) · [Social robot study](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2025.100751) ### Büşra Sarıkaya Güven **Research collaborator** Büşra Sarıkaya Güven is a clinical psychologist. She graduated in Psychology from Boğaziçi University and completed an MA in Clinical Psychology at Yeditepe University. Her thesis combined interviews and quantitative measures to study how parental perfectionism and parents’ ability to reflect on mental states relate to parental burnout. She and Burcu Ünlütabak coauthored a poster on this work for the 2026 APS Annual Convention. She held a research scholarship on Ünlütabak’s TÜBİTAK project on children’s interactions with AI and coauthored the 2026 voice assistant preprint. She interned at the Mother Child Education Foundation (AÇEV) and worked on the İstanbul95 early childhood project, where she interviewed parents and helped assess young children’s development during home visits. A University of East London scholarship supported six weeks of research in London on how children’s environments relate to their development. [Professional biography](https://busrasarikaya.com/hakkimda/) · [APS poster abstract](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/archive/2026annual/paper/59870/) · [Voice assistant study](/research/children-voice-assistants.md) ### Zeynep Gedikoğlu **Research collaborator** Zeynep Gedikoğlu graduated in Psychology from Yeditepe University, where she took part in research projects and completed internships. She contributed data coding to Ünlütabak and Duygun Erol Barkana’s 2025 study of how children ask questions of a social robot. She also coauthored the 2026 voice assistant preprint on how children’s questions vary with the information they receive and with parents’ beliefs about child-rearing. [Graduation announcement on LinkedIn](https://tr.linkedin.com/posts/zeynep-gediko%C4%9Flu_graduation-psychologygraduate-psikolog-activity-7483159474992586752-MANy) · [Social robot study](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2025.100751) · [Voice assistant study](/research/children-voice-assistants.md) ## A place for questions Students and researchers from different disciplines are welcome to express interest. [Work with us](/join.md) · [See our publications](/publications.md) --- [Curtainplate Laboratories](/index.md) · [Research](/research.md) · [People](/people.md) · [Publications](/publications.md) · [About](/about.md) · [Contact](/contact.md) · [Join us](/join.md) · [Take part](/participate.md) · [Privacy](/privacy.md)