At the most general
level I am interested in how we come to make sense of the world
around us. Much of this research involves asking how intuitive
explanations and understandings emerge in development and how they
are related to notions of cause, mechanism and agency. These
relations are linked to broader questions of what concepts are, how
they change with development and increasing expertise and how they
are structured in adults.
One set of current studies is examining a level of explanatory insight that functions without knowledge of specific mechanisms and instead involves knowing what sorts of properties are causally potent in a domain and how they are likely to interact. These patterns vary considerably across large scale domains of phenomena such as living kinds vs. artifacts) and a partial understanding of these patterns emerges very early in development and guides learning of more detailed domain specific beliefs. Other studies are examining constraints on preferences for some explanations over others even when there is little or no specific knowledge of the phenomena under explanation.
We are also asking how
emerging knowledge of concrete mechanisms can link up frequency based
information with abstract explanatory principles as well as cause
distortions in judgement. A key part of developing such
understandings also involves learning how knowledge is clustered and
distributed in the minds others and how best to access that
knowledge. We are exploring dramatic developmental and individual
differences in how the social distribution of knowledge is
understood. Finally, there is a longstanding interest in links
between conceptual and semantic development and how the emergence of
language interacts with conceptual structure.
