About My Research

I study how infants and young children come to understand the world and the role that others play in their cognitive growth. My work is particularly concerned with the development of shared intentionality and the awareness that our access to the world is perspectival. In our most recent studies, we investigate preschoolers’ ideas about teaching (e.g., “What makes a good teacher and why?”) and their abilities to seek help from others to accelerate their learning. These studies have been funded by the German National Merit Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood.

I favor a humanistic approach over the “crude empiricism” that dominates today’s psychology. In this vein, I bring in ideas from philosophy of mind, philosophy of education, and philosophical anthropology. With colleagues from philosophy (e.g., Andrea Kern, University of Leipzig), I have argued that our species’ extraordinarily relational and interdependent nature shapes our ontogeny and thinking from the beginning of life. This line of work has been funded by the Saxonian Academy of the Sciences, the Templeton Foundation (John Templeton Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study), and, most recently, the Spencer Foundation (Midcareer Grant).

Please see the MID.LA website for what we do in our child research lab at USC.