Alison Gopnik
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 493947 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alison Gopnik |
| PRENOMES | Alison |
| SOBRENOME | Gopnik |
| ASSINATURA | GOPNIK A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7183-0867 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 219 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 63 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1982 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Causal relational problem solving in toddlers
We investigate young children's capacity for "causal relational reasoning": the ability to use relational reasoning to design novel interventions and bring about novel outcomes. In two experiments, we show that 24-30-month-old toddlers and three-year-old preschoolers use relational reasoning in a causal problem-solving task. Even toddlers rapidly inferred relational causal rules and applied this knowledge to solve novel problems--thus demonstrati…
Investigating the validity of picture-based assessments across cultures and contexts
Many childhood assessments rely on picture stimuli, but children in diverse early environments possess varying amounts of experience with pictures. Two preregistered experiments, conducted in 2022-2023, investigated whether picture assessments are valid across diverse contexts. Low-to-middle-income children ( n = 192, 2-7 years, 85 females, all Black) in their first month of formal schooling in Mombasa County, Kenya, an early environment with rel…
Fun isn't easy
Play is important in many cultures and species, but the basic motivations behind play remain unclear. In two preregistered experiments, we examined what 5- to 10-year-old children ( n = 124) think makes play rewarding under internally and externally motivated contexts using a novel game design task. We specifically compared children's choices about how to best configure a novel tossing game when either playing for fun or playing to win . We found…
How Do Infants Experience Caregiving
Almost all of human infants’ experience and learning takes place in the context of caregiving relationships. This essay considers how infants understand the care they receive. We begin by outlining plausible features of an “intuitive theory” of care. In this intuitive theory, caregiving has both a distinctive foundational structure and distinctive features that differentiate it from other social relationships. We then review methods and findings …
Introduction
For most people, most of the time, caring for others, particularly close others-children and parents, wives and husbands-is at once one of the most meaningful, important, and morally compelling things we ever do-and one of the most difficult. With a few exceptions, however, this foundational human capacity has been oddly invisible in the social and human sciences. In this volume of Dædalus, “The Social Science of Caregiving,” we aim to at least b…
Preschoolers’ Comprehension of Functional Metaphors
Previous work suggests that preschoolers often misunderstand metaphors. However, some recent studies demonstrate that preschoolers can represent abstract relations, suggesting that the cognitive foundations of metaphor comprehension may develop earlier than previously believed. The present experiments used novel paradigms to explore whether preschoolers (N = 200; 4–5 years; 100 males, 100 females; predominantly White) can understand metaphors bas…
Papers Involved in the December 2022 APS Vote of No Confidence in the Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives on Psychological Science
Transmission Versus Truth, Imitation Versus Innovation
Much discussion about large language models and language-and-vision models has focused on whether these models are intelligent agents. We present an alternative perspective. First, we argue that these artificial intelligence (AI) models are cultural technologies that enhance cultural transmission and are efficient and powerful imitation engines. Second, we explore what AI models can tell us about imitation and innovation by testing whether they c…
Preschoolers and adults metonymically extend proper names to owned objects
Three preregistered experiments, conducted in 2021, investigated whether English-speaking American preschoolers (N = 120; 4–6 years; 54 females, predominantly White) and adults (N = 80; 18–52 years; 59 females, predominantly Asian) metonymically extend owners' names to owned objects—an extension not typically found in English. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-olds and adults extended names to owned objects over duplicates (d = 0.34 in children; d =…
Using games to understand the mind
Caregiving in Philosophy, Biology & Political Economy
Caring for the young and the old, the fragile and the ill, is central to human thriving, and has played a fundamental role in human evolution. Yet care has been largely invisible in political economy and it does not fit the prevailing philosophical, political, and economic frameworks. Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “socia…
The development of creative search strategies
How does creativity develop? Creativity is a multi-faceted behavior and thus it is difficult to find measures for creativity that are both precise and comparable across development. Here, we examine the development of creativity using a "creative foraging" task. The task measures different facets of creativity which we compare between 4- to 8-year-old children and adults. We find that compared to adults, children spend a higher percentage of thei…
Children are more exploratory and learn more than adults in an approach-avoid task
Intuitively, children appear to be more exploratory than adults, and this exploration seems to help children learn,. However, there have been few clear tests of these ideas. We test whether exploration and learning change across development using a task that presents a "learning trap." In this task, exploitation-maximizing immediate reward and avoiding costs-may lead the learner to draw incorrect conclusions, while exploration may lead to better …
The future of human behaviour research
The Future of Women in Psychological Science
There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field’s investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women’s career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issu…
Culture moderates the relationship between self-control ability and free will beliefs in childhood
We investigate individual, developmental, and cultural differences in self-control in relation to children's changing belief in "free will" - the possibility of acting against and inhibiting strong desires. In three studies, 4- to 8-year-olds in the U.S., China, Singapore, and Peru (N = 441) answered questions to gauge their belief in free will and completed a series of self-control and inhibitory control tasks. Children across all four cultures …
How is the hypothesis space represented? Evidence from young children’s active search and predictions in a multiple-cue inference task
To successfully navigate an uncertain world, one has to learn the relationship between cues (e.g., wind speed, atmospheric pressure) and outcomes (e.g., rain). When learning, it is possible to actively manipulate the cue values to test hypotheses about this relationship directly. Across two studies, we investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds actively learned cue-outcome relationships, and what their behavior revealed about how they represented the hyp…
Les parents en font-ils trop
Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions
I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore–exploit trade-offs, search …
Young Children Are Wishful Thinkers
Previously, research on wishful thinking has found that desires bias older children’s and adults’ predictions during probabilistic reasoning tasks. In this article, we explore wishful thinking in children aged 3- to 10-years-old. Do young children learn to be wishful thinkers? Or do they begin with a wishful thinking bias that is gradually overturned during development? Across five experiments, we compare low- and middle-income United States and …
Transformations and Transfer
Previous research suggests that preschoolers struggle with understanding abstract relations and with reasoning by analogy. Four experiments find, in contrast, that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 168) are surprisingly adept at relational and analogical reasoning within a causal context. In earlier studies preschoolers routinely favored images that share thematic or perceptual commonalities with a target image (object matches) over choices that match the …
Learning what to change
Novel causal systems pose a problem of variable choice: How can a reasoner decide which variable is causally relevant? Which variable in the system should a learner manipulate to try to produce a desired, yet unfamiliar, casual outcome? In much causal reasoning research, participants learn how a particular set of preselected variables produce a particular effect. Here, we investigate 3- to 5-year-olds' ability to select the relevant variable for …
Comment les enfants pensent-ils
Children’s developing theory of mind and pedagogical evidence selection
Natural pedagogy emerges early in development, but good teaching requires tailoring evidence to learners' knowledge. How does the ability to reason about others' minds support early pedagogical evidence selection abilities? In 3 experiments ( N = 205), we investigated preschool-aged children's ability to consider others' knowledge when selecting evidence in the service of teaching. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that 4-year-olds reliably sele…
Life history, love and learning
Early reasoning about desires
Reconstructing constructivism
We propose a new version of the "theory theory" grounded in the computational framework of probabilistic causal models and Bayesian learning. Probabilistic models allow a constructivist but rigorous and detailed approach to cognitive development. They also explain the learning of both more specific causal hypotheses and more abstract framework theories. We outline the new theoretical ideas, explain the computational framework in an intuitive and …
Causal learning mechanisms in very young children
Three studies investigated whether young children make accurate causal inferences on the basis of patterns of variation and covariation. Children were presented with a new causal relation by means of a machine called the "blicket detector." Some objects, but not others, made the machine light up and play music. In the first 2 experiments, children were told that "blickets make the machine go" and were then asked to identify which objects were "bl…
Young children's ability to identify the sources of their beliefs
Young children's ability to understand which experiences led to a belief was investigated in 3 studies. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds learned about the contents of a toy tunnel in three different ways : they saw the contents, were told about them, or felt them. Immediately after each trial, children were asked to state what was in the tunnel and also how they knew about the contents of the tunnel
Conditional probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning
This study examines preschoolers' causal assumptions about spatial contiguity and how these assumptions interact with new evidence in the form of conditional probabilities. Preschoolers saw a toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Children were shown evidence for the toy's activation rule in the form of patterns of probability: The toy was more likely to activate either when objects made contact with its surface (on condition) or …
Causal learning across domains
Five studies investigated (a) children's ability to use the dependent and independent probabilities of events to make causal inferences and (b) the interaction between such inferences and domain-specific knowledge. In Experiment 1, preschoolers used patterns of dependence and independence to make accurate causal inferences in the domains of biology and psychology. Experiment 2 replicated the results in the domain of biology with a more complex pa…
The Scientist as Child
This paper argues that there are powerful similarities between cognitive development in children and scientific theory change. These similarities are best explained by postulating an underlying abstract set of rules and representations that underwrite both types of cognitive abilities. In fact, science may be successful largely because it exploits powerful and flexible cognitive devices that were designed by evolution to facilitate learning in yo…
The development of structural thinking about social categories
Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking pink") in structural terms, locating an object of explanation within a larger structure and identifying structural co…
Children’s causal inferences from conflicting testimony and observations
Preschoolers use both direct observation of statistical data and informant testimony to learn causal relationships. Can children integrate information from these sources, especially when source reliability is uncertain? We investigate how children handle a conflict between what they hear and what they see. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were introduced to a machine and 2 blocks by a knowledgeable informant who claimed to know which block was better…
From people, to plans, to objects
Using games to understand the mind
Learning about causes from people
How do infants and young children learn about the causal structure of the world around them? In 4 experiments we investigate whether young children initially give special weight to the outcomes of goal-directed interventions they see others perform and use this to distinguish correlations from genuine causal relations--observational causal learning. In a new 2-choice procedure, 2- to 4-year-old children saw 2 identical objects (potential causes).…
The future of human behaviour research
Infants learn about objects from statistics and people
In laboratory experiments, infants are sensitive to patterns of visual features that co-occur (e.g., Fiser & Aslin, 2002). Once infants learn the statistical regularities, however, what do they do with that knowledge? Moreover, which patterns do infants learn in the cluttered world outside of the laboratory? Across 4 experiments, we show that 9-month-olds use this sensitivity to make inferences about object properties. In Experiment 1, 9-month-ol…
Reply to Commentators
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Children’s developing theory of mind and pedagogical evidence selection
Natural pedagogy emerges early in development, but good teaching requires tailoring evidence to learners' knowledge. How does the ability to reason about others' minds support early pedagogical evidence selection abilities? In 3 experiments ( N = 205), we investigated preschool-aged children's ability to consider others' knowledge when selecting evidence in the service of teaching. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that 4-year-olds reliably sele…
Introduction
For most people, most of the time, caring for others, particularly close others-children and parents, wives and husbands-is at once one of the most meaningful, important, and morally compelling things we ever do-and one of the most difficult. With a few exceptions, however, this foundational human capacity has been oddly invisible in the social and human sciences. In this volume of Dædalus, “The Social Science of Caregiving,” we aim to at least b…
Finding our inner scientist
Popper had a fateful meeting with the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Cambridge Philosophy Club. In a talk to the Club, with Wittgenstein in the audience, Popper described several “philosophical problems”– important, dif1⁄2cult questions that he thought would one day be answered. Here Popper was issuing a direct challenge to Wittgenstein, who had argued that philosophy could only analyze linguistic puzzles–not solve any real pr…
Words and plans
Many early words encode aspects of plans, that is, actions performed in order to bring about events. Gone and down encode the fact that an action is intended to bring about a certain type of event. There and oh dear encode the success or failure of plans, no encodes the rejection of a plan. More encodes the repetition of a plan. It is argued that the concepts encoded by gone and down are like the concepts that underlie trial- and-error problem-so…
Conceptual and semantic change in scientists and children
Semantic and cognitive development in 15- to 21-month-old children
Recent studies suggest a specific relationship between the acquisition of the word ‘gone’ and the development of the object concept. A longitudinal study investigated whether there is a similar relationship between the acquisition of words that encode success and failure, such as no, uh-oh and there , and the development of means–ends skills. A cross-sectional study investigated both these relationships. The results suggest that children acquire …
The acquisition of gone and the development of the object concept
The relationship between the acquisition of gone and the development of the object concept is investigated. Children acquire gone at the same time that they solve serial invisible displacement tasks, in a transitional period in the development of the object concept. According to a ‘neo-piagetian’ account of the object concept, children move from using specific rules to predict the reappearance of objects, to using a general theory of object movem…
From people, to plans, to objects
Three types of early word
The early words that 27 children produced between the ages of 12 and 20 months were analysed. Social words, such as that used to point out objects or no used to refuse suggestions, were consistently among the first words to appear. A small number of names also appeared in the very early period. Cognitive-relational words, such as gone used to indicate disappearance or no used to indicate failure consistently appeared after some social words had b…
Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its Relation to the Understanding of False Belief and the Appearance-Reality Distinction
Alison Gopnik, Janet W. Astington, Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its Relation to the Understanding of False Belief and the Appearance-Reality Distinction, Child Development, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), pp. 26-37
Do linguistic differences lead to cognitive differences? A cross-linguistic study of semantic and cognitive development
Semantic and cognitive development were studied in eight Korean and French-speaking children, and these results were compared with results for 12 English-speakers. The children received object- permanence, means-ends and categorization tasks and their develop ment of related linguistic forms, disappearance and success/failure words and a naming spurt, was recorded. There were close and specific relations between these semantic and cognitive devel…
Young children's ability to identify the sources of their beliefs
Young children's ability to understand which experiences led to a belief was investigated in 3 studies. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds learned about the contents of a toy tunnel in three different ways : they saw the contents, were told about them, or felt them. Immediately after each trial, children were asked to state what was in the tunnel and also how they knew about the contents of the tunnel
Why the Child's Theory of Mind Really Is a Theory
Peer Reviewed
How we know our minds
As adults we believe that our knowledge of our own psychological states is substantially different from our knowledge of the psychological states of others: First-person knowledge comes directly from experience, but third-person knowledge involves inference. Developmental evidence suggests otherwise. Many 3-year-old children are consistently wrong in reporting some of their own immediately past psychological states and show similar difficulties r…
Psychopsychology
The Psychopsychology of the Fringe
The theory theory
This is a book about domain-specific cognition – the proposal that at least some human conceptual abilities are specialized for some types of contents and not for others. In this chapter we address the development of a single domain: everyday understanding of the mind. We suggest that this development is best understood as the formulation of a succession of naive theories. Moreover, this “theory theory” can help to characterize cognitive domains …
Early acquisition of verbs in Korean
This cross-linguistic study investigates children's early lexical development in English and Korean, and compares caregivers' linguistic input in the two languages. In Study 1, the lexical development of nine Korean children was followed from 1;2 to 1;10 by monthly visits and maternal reports. These Korean data were compared to previously collected English longitudinal data. We find that: (1) Korean children as young as 1;3 use verbs productively…
Theories of Theories of Mind
Theories of Theories of Mind brings together contributions by a distinguished international team of philosophers, psychologists, and primatologists, who between them address such questions as: what is it to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people? How does such an understanding develop in the normal child? Why, unusually, does it fail to develop? And is any such mentalistic understanding shared by members of other specie…
Reply to Commentators
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Scientist as Child
This paper argues that there are powerful similarities between cognitive development in children and scientific theory change. These similarities are best explained by postulating an underlying abstract set of rules and representations that underwrite both types of cognitive abilities. In fact, science may be successful largely because it exploits powerful and flexible cognitive devices that were designed by evolution to facilitate learning in yo…
Words, Thoughts, and Theories
Words, Thoughts, and Theories articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories, a view of the origins of knowledge and meaning that has broad implications for cognitive science. Gopnik and Meltzoff interweave philosophical arguments and empirical data from their own and other's research. Both the phil…
Early reasoning about desires
Causal learning mechanisms in very young children
Three studies investigated whether young children make accurate causal inferences on the basis of patterns of variation and covariation. Children were presented with a new causal relation by means of a machine called the "blicket detector." Some objects, but not others, made the machine light up and play music. In the first 2 experiments, children were told that "blickets make the machine go" and were then asked to identify which objects were "bl…
A Theory of Causal Learning in Children
The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children's causa…
Causal learning across domains
Five studies investigated (a) children's ability to use the dependent and independent probabilities of events to make causal inferences and (b) the interaction between such inferences and domain-specific knowledge. In Experiment 1, preschoolers used patterns of dependence and independence to make accurate causal inferences in the domains of biology and psychology. Experiment 2 replicated the results in the domain of biology with a more complex pa…
Finding our inner scientist
Popper had a fateful meeting with the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Cambridge Philosophy Club. In a talk to the Club, with Wittgenstein in the audience, Popper described several “philosophical problems”– important, dif1⁄2cult questions that he thought would one day be answered. Here Popper was issuing a direct challenge to Wittgenstein, who had argued that philosophy could only analyze linguistic puzzles–not solve any real pr…
Asynchrony in the cognitive and lexical development of young children with Williams syndrome
The present study investigates whether five-to-six-year-old children with Williams syndrome (N=8) can form new object categories based on naming information alone, and compares them with five groups of typically developing children aged 2;0 to 6;0 (N=34 children). Children were presented with triads of dissimilar objects; all objects in a triad were labelled, two of them with the same pseudoname. Name-based categorization was evaluated through ob…
Psychology (52 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (37 obras) · Cognitive psychology (32 obras) · Developmental psychology (29 obras) · Cognition (26 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Cognitive science (20 obras) · Linguistics (14 obras) · Epistemology (12 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras)