Frank C. Keil



Professor (Ph.D., 1977, University of Pennsylvania)

Yale Cognition and Development Lab

Most of the research in my lab is concerned with the question of how we carve up the world into meaningful clusters and reason about those clusters. This question leads to research projects on categorization, intuitive theories, conceptual change, words and concepts, and causal understanding with a special emphasis on how patterns vary across conceptual domains.

Our research on intuitive theories asks about the coarseness of grain with which we track causal regularities and stable patterns. We have documented an illusion of explanatory depth in which people think they understand how and why things occur in far greater detail than they really do. Behind this illusion are highly sparse understandings of functional and dynamic systems. We are exploring several ways in which these more skeletal understandings guide cognition and how they become more elaborated with development.

We often deal with gaps in understanding by relying on the division of cognitive labor that occurs in all cultures. Our work shows that even preschoolers use notions of the division of cognitive labor to guide inferences about knowledge clusters. Other projects show how that early understanding develops dramatically in later years and is linked to skeletal theories of how the world is structured.

These issues are compared and contrasted across domains such as living kinds, classes of artifacts, and intentional agents. We are interested in how reasoning in each of these domains influences the interpretation and representation of new information. For related reasons we have conducted studies across cultures, and across a wide range of ages and levels of expertise. Even more broadly, these research questions have led me to work on metaphor, conceptual combinations, reasoning about supernatural religious entities, medical diagnosis, internet search behavior, and the simulated evolution of cognitive modules.