April 27: Caren Walker, Department of Psychology

 Learning by Thinking and the Development of Abstract Reasoning

By 5 years of age, children already have highly structured knowledge of the world and they routinely form rich, abstract representations that extend beyond their direct experiences. How do children learn so quickly and accurately from such limited information? The vast majority of research to date has explored this question by investigating children’s developing abilities to draw inductive inferences from their observations. However, one of the distinguishing features of human cognition is our ability to go beyond the data and to generate ideas by thinking alone. How is learning by thinking possible? What does this phenomenon tell us about the nature of early mental representations and how they change? To begin to answer these questions, we must first isolate the contributions of our observations from the mechanisms that underlie learning. To this end, my research focuses on a suite of thought-based learning phenomena that are particularly widespread in childhood, including learning by analogy, by explanation, and by engagement in imaginary worlds. I will describe both theoretical and empirical work suggesting that these activities each impose unique, top-down constraints on children’s inferential processes. 

This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm