Karen Wynn



Professor (Ph.D., 1990, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Personal Home Page, Yale Infant Cognition Laboratory  
 
 

My research investigates the core mental processes and structures through which we interpret (and impose structure upon) incoming information, and which enable us to reason about and act upon the world. In the Infant Development Lab, my students and I are studying infants and young children as a means to accessing the core architecture of the human mind as it exists prior to the developmental influences of language, culture, education, and extensive experience. We are examining both initial structure - what humans are born with - and also how these initial structures develop over time, with input and experience. Specific areas of research include:

1. Early "naïve psychology," or understanding of others' minds: What are the mental processes and structures with which infants interpret and reason about the social world? We are able to reason automatically and effortlessly about intentional agents - other beings with minds, who possess intents and goals and have the ability to act towards their goals. And we automatically interpret interactions between intentional agents as social interactions that arise from, and influence, their mental attitudes and predispositions towards each other. What are the mental foundations underlying this ability to interpret certain events in psychological and social terms? We are examining the precursors of social and psychological understanding in infants and young children.
   
   
2. Early social-emotional processes and development: How do infants understand their own place in the social world? How do they interact with others, and what factors influence the social-emotional signals, expressions, and responses that infants produce in social interactions? How do these processes develop with age and with the increases in social interactions that come with the capacity for self-locomotion? We are examining infants' social-emotional behaviors, (infants' smiles as one example) during face-to-face interactions in different contexts and to different social partners, with the thesis that distinct responses and expressions are designed to have distinct effects on the recipient social partner -- that is, the infant is an active participant in influencing and molding his or her social interactions. A specific sub-thesis is that human infants have evolved to assess the level of social threat an individual poses in a given context, and will respond differently depending on that assessment.
   
   
3. The foundations of moral cognition: We are exploring the origins and development, in infants, toddlers and preschoolers, of moral concepts such as "good" and "bad." What are the conditions that influence infants and young children to judge certain acts as good or right, others as bad or wrong? How do they view individuals who have committed such acts? And what, if anything, do they infer about the evaluations that other agents will make towards such individuals? How do these concepts and judgments change with age?
   
   
4. Foundations of mathematical cognition: We are examining numerical competence - and limits to this competence - in infants and young children. Recent studies of ours have been investigating such issues as, for example, young infants' ability to compute approximate outcomes of addition and subtraction over "large" numbers, the capacity of infants to compute the numerical ratio between two values, and related issues. What are the mechanisms underlying the capacity for numerical thought? How is the human mind able to grasp such abstract concepts as "prime number" and "infinity"?
   
   
5. Early knowledge of objects, or "naïve physics": While in many ways infants have a highly sophisticated understanding of objects, we have found some surprising limitations to this understanding, which can inform us about the cognitive structures underlying infants' object knowledge. We are also investigating the relationship between object cognition as studied in infants, and aspects of object cognition such as object-based attention and visual object cognition processes that have been studied in adults. While these two bodies of work have been conducted on different populations, using different research methods, and each having its own language of terms, many of the actual processes examined appear identical across the two literatures. We are using findings with infants to motivate studies with adults, and vice-versa, to obtain a fuller picture of the fundamental nature of object cognition.

Hamlin, J.K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450, 557-559.

Wynn, K. (2008).  Some innate foundations of social and moral cognition. In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence & S. Stich (Eds.), The Innate Mind: Foundations and the Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Newman, G., Herrmann, P., Wynn, K., & Keil, F. (2008). Biases towards internal features in infants' reasoning about objects. Cognition, 107, 420-432.

Yamaguchi, M., Kuhlmeier, V., Wynn, K. & vanMarle, K. (2009).  Continuity in social cognition from infancy to childhood.  Developmental Science, 12, 746-752.

Wynn, K. (2009). Constraints on natural altruism. British Journal of Psychology, 100, 481-485.