Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz

My research bridges two research traditions: Cognitive Development and Computational Modeling. By jointly working in these methods, I hope to understand the structure of children's early causal beliefs, how evidence and prior beliefs interact to affect children's learning, and the additional developmental processes that influence children's belief revisions. My current work is examining how rational process models (approaches that approximate rational inference) shed insight on learning behavior that may sometimes appear "non-optimal", such as whether children evaluate a sampled subset of possible hypotheses during causal learning and induction. See cocosci.berkeley.edu/Liz/.

Daphna Buchsbaum

I'm interested in how children and adults understand and learn from other people's behavior, and ultimately developing intelligent computer programs with some of these same social learning abilities. Currently, my research is focused on the problem of action segmentation: when faced with a continuous stream of behavior, how do we identify individual, meaningful actions? How do we decide what the effects of these action sequences are? I'm exploring how both preschoolers and adults use causal structure and statistical patterns in human motion to help understand other's behavior, as well as using Bayesian computational approaches to try and model human action understanding. See www.daphna.org.

Stephanie Denison

I am a graduate student co-advised by Alison Gopnik and Fei Xu exploring conceptual development in infants and young children. In the Gopnik lab I'm working on projects involving causal reasoning and probabilistic inference in preschoolers. We are exploring how children select hypotheses in a causal inference task and how those hypotheses change in response to evidence. In Fei Xu's lab I study the developmental origins of probabilistic reasoning as well as the interaction between probabilistic inference and quantification systems in infancy. See scholar.berkeley.edu/sdenison/.

Elizabeth Seiver

I study how children view the underlying causes of others people's actions. Do they tend to think traits or situations are responsible for behavior, and can their views on this change based on supporting or disconfirming evidence? How do these views change over time with age, and how do they vary across cultures?

Anna Waisman

Anna is a graduate student in psychology conducting comparative and developmental research on causal and spatial reasoning. She is interested in what inferences dogs are able to make about causal events in the world and how this compares to the complex inferences that young children are able to make. She is currently conducting studies on how dogs and 2-4 year old children compare when given a complex causal inference task. In this task both dogs and children are given little to no verbal instruction and asked to combine observed correlational information with their own inferences to determine the appropriate interventions to make a rewarding event occur. She has also completed a set of studies examining how wild, free-ranging squirrels on the UCBerkeley campus re-locate in the spring, the nuts they cached in the fall (Waisman & Jacobs 2008). She is currently working on both a computational modeling account of such spatial decision strategies and a comparative study looking at how preschool age children make decisions in the same task. Email awaisman AT berkeley DOT edu.

Caren Walker

My research explores children’s representation of fictional worlds, the function of these imaginative artifacts in mental life, and the relationship that exists between fictional modes of cognition and causal learning.  I am interested in how children and adults uncover the underlying causal structure of the real world by engaging in these counterfactual scenarios. See scholar.berkeley.edu/carenwalker/.