Curious, cooperative, and communicative: How we learn from others and help others learn

Humans are not the only species that learns from others, but only humans learn and communicate in rich, diverse social contexts, and build repertoires of abstract, structured knowledge. What makes human social learning so distinctive, powerful, and smart?  In this talk, I argue that social learning is inferential at its core (inferential social learning); rather than copying what others do or trusting what others say, humans learn from others by drawing rich inferences from others’ behaviors, and help others learn by generating evidence tailored to others’ goals and knowledge states.

The Implications of Polysemy for Theories of Word Learnin

Most common words in English and in other languages are polysemous, expressing a family of distinct but related meanings (e.g., “chicken” can refer to a kind of animal, meat, game, or cowardly person). Yet within developmental science, word learning is typically studied as a problem in which children need to learn one meaning for each word. I will argue that simplifying the object of study in this way has led researchers to formulate theories which incorrectly predict that children should struggle at learning polysemous words.

Using DNA to predict children's developmental differences

Children's differences in early life development have pervasive, long-term influence on their later life outcomes, such as education, health, and well-being. A major source of children's developmental differences is their family background, which includes the rearing environments that they grow up in and the DNA differences that children inherit from their parents.

What Happened to the 'Mental' in 'Mental" Disorders

People often seek help for mental problems because they are suffering subjectively. Yet, for decades, the subjective experience of patients has been marginalized. This is in part due to the dominant medical model of mental illness, which has tended to treat subjective experience as a quaint relic of a scientifically less enlightened time. To the extent that subjective symptoms are related to the underlying problem, it is often assumed that they will be taken care of if the more objective symptoms, such as behavioral and physiological responses are treated.

Rethinking behavior in the light of evolution

Abstract: In psychology and neuroscience, the human brain is usually described as an information processing system that encodes and manipulates representations of knowledge to produce plans of action. This view leads to a decomposition of brain functions into putative processes such as object recognition, memory, decision-making, action planning, etc., inspiring the search for the neural correlates of these processes. However, neurophysiological data does not support many of the predictions of these classic subdivisions.

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