Henrike Moll, PhD

I study social cognition in infancy and early childhood. My work is particularly concerned with the emergence of joint attention and the question of how children come to learn that objects (things, events etc.) can be viewed from different perspectives and can be placed under various concepts. The experimental studies that I conduct with my colleagues demonstrate that young children are astonishingly skilled at taking another’s point of view, but also show some notable limitations. These studies further suggest that children’s understanding of perspectives builds on their capacity for joint attention. This empirical work has been funded by the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes), the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.

I am also involved in philosophy of mind and philosophical anthropology. Together with my colleague Andrea Kern (University of Leipzig), I study the differences between human and animal cognition. I am particularly interested in the species-unique ways in which humans act and think from the beginning of their lives, and in the role that shared intentionality plays in this context. For this research, I have received funds from the Saxonian Academy of the Sciences and from the Templeton Foundation (John Templeton Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study).

Please see the MID.LA website for what is going on in our child research laboratory at USC.

Fellowships, Grants, and Awards

• 2002-2005
  Doctoral Fellowship from the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes)
• 2004  
  Fellowship for the CEU (Central European University) Summer University “Understanding actions and minds”, Budapest
• 2008
  Travel Award for the International Conference on Infant Studies
• 2007-2012
  Dilthey-Fellowship (5-year-research grant: € 400, 000) from the Volkswagen Foundation. Role: PI
• 2011
  Young Mind and Brain Prize, Center of Cognitive Science of Turin
  Young Academy Memberhsip
• 2011-2012
  Fellowship for the SIAS Summer Institute “The Second Person”, held in Chapel Hill (2011) and Berlin (2012)
• 2012
  Grant for Research Group “The Anthropological Difference: Empirical and Conceptual Perspectives”, awarded by the Saxonian Academy of Sciences: € 365, 000. Role: PI
• 2013  
  Spring 2013 Learning Environments Grant, University of Southern California
• 2014  
  Zumberge Interdisciplinary Award, University of Southern California. Role: Lead-PI (w/ E. Kaiser, S. Narayanan)Grant for project “The Emergence and Modeling of Counterfactual Reasoning”, awarded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR): $ 750, 000. Role: Lead-PI (w/ Morteza Dehghani)

   

Recent Publications

• Grosse, G., Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Infants appreciate the cooperative logic of requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 3377-3383.
• Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Infant cognition. Current Biology, 20(20), R872-R875.
• Tomasello, M. & Moll, H. (2010). The gap is social: Human shared intentionality and culture. In P. Kappeler & J. Silk (Eds.), Mind the gap: Tracing the origins of human universals (pp. 331-349). Berlin: Springer.
• Callaghan, T., Moll, H., Rakozcy, H., Warneken, F., Liszkowski, U., Behne, T. & Tomasello, M. (2011). Early social cognition in three cultural contexts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(2),vii-viii, 1-142.
• Moll, H., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Social engagement leads 2-year-olds to overestimate others’ knowledge. Infancy, 16(3), 248-265.
• Moll, H., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2011). How does it look? Level 2 perspective-taking at 36 months. Child Development, 82(2), 661-673.
• Moll, H., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2011). Joint attention as the fundamental basis of perspectives. In A. Seemann (Ed.), Joint attention: New developments in psychology, philosophy of mind, and social neuroscience (pp. 393-413). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Moll, H., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2011). Perspective-taking and its foundation in joint attention. In N. Eilan, H. Lerman, & J. Roessler (Eds.), Perception, Causation, and Objectivity. Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (pp. 286-304).Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Moll, H. (2011). Über die Entwicklung eines Verstehens von Wahrnehmung und Perspektivität. In R. Schmidt, W. Stock, & J. Volbers (Eds.), Zeigen: Grunddimensionen einer Tätigkeit (pp. 230-246). Weilerswist: Velbrück.
• Tomasello, M., & Moll, H. (2011). Replik auf die Kommentare. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 59(1), 164-169.
• Moll, H. (2012). Von der Teilnahme an gemeinsamer Aufmerksamkeit zum Begriff von Perspektiven: Stufen einer Entwicklung. In P. Stekeler-Weithofer (Ed.), Wittgenstein: Philosophie und Wissenschaft (pp. 251-267). Hamburg: Meiner.
• Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Three-year-olds understand appearance and reality—just not about the same object at the same time. Developmental Psychology, 48(8), 1124-1132.
• Kompa, N., Moll, H., Eckardt, R., & Grassmann, S. (2013). Sprache, sprachliche Bedeutung, Sprachverstehen und Kontext. In A. Stephan, & H. Walter (Eds.), Handbuch Kognitionswissenschaft (pp. 432-443). Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag.
• Moll, H. (2013). Human-specific forms of cognition prior to judgments. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 86, 235-245.
• Moll, H. (2013). Ontogenetic precursors of assertion and denial. In S. Roedl, & H. Tegtmeyer (Eds.), Essays in honor of Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer (pp. 337-346). Boston, MA: DeGruyter.
• Moll, H., & Kadipasaoglu, D. (2013). The primacy of social over visual perspective-taking. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7(558). doi: 10.3389/fnhum2013.00558
• Moll, H., Meltzoff, A. N., Merzsch, K., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Taking versus confronting visual perspectives in preschool children. Developmental Psychology, 49(4). 646-654.
• Tomasello, M., & Moll, H. (2013). Why don’t apes understand false beliefs? In M. R. Banaji, & S. A. Gelman (Eds.). Navigating the social world: What infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 81-87). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Moll, H. (2014). Über die parallele Entwicklung eines Verstehens von Bildern und Worten. In G. Boehm, E. Alloa, O. Budelacci, & G. Wildgruber (Eds.), Imagination: Suchen und Finden (pp. 245-252). München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
• Moll, H., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Two- and three-year-olds know what others have and have not heard. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15, 12-21.
• Moll, H., Arellano, D., Guzman, A., Cordova, X., & Madrigal, J. A. (2015). Preschoolers’ mutualistic conception of seeing and its relation to their knowledge of the pronoun ‘each other’. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 131, 170-185.
• Moll, H. (2016). Tension in the natural history of human thinking. Journal of Social Ontology, 2(1), 65-73.
• Moll, H., Kane, S., & McGowan, L. (2016). Three-year-olds express suspense when an agent approaches a scene with a false belief. Developmental Science, 19(2), 208-220.