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Children's Theories of Mind

Together with postdoctoral and graduate students in Philosophy, Anthropology, and Psychology, Professor Gopnik from Psychology is studying how children of different ages conceive of their own minds and those of others and whether the way that children's minds develop can be usefully construed as similar to theory change in science. This project has led to two books, "Words, Thoughts and Theories" and "The Scientist in the Crib". More recently, she have been involved in an extensive interdisciplinary project on causal inference which involves ethology and computation as well as philosophy and psychology. she has been collaborating with Danny Povinelli at The University of Louisiana on comparative work looking at the evolution of causal inference in chimpanzees and humans, and with Clark Glymour at CMU I have been doing work applying "Bayes-Net" computational models to children's inferences about causes. This work has also been very much influenced by interdisciplinary interactions here at Berkeley through the Institute for Cognitive Studies, particularly with Lucia Jacobs in comparative psychology and Stuart Russell in computer science.

Together with postdoctoral and graduate students in Philosophy, Anthropology, and Psychology, Professor Gopnik from Psychology is studying how children of different ages conceive of their own minds and those of others. They approach such questions experimentally, for example, by showing children a box that normally contains candy and then later showing that it actually contains pencils. Young children give answers indicating that they not only now believe that there are pencils in the box, but that they always thought there were pencils in the box, despite prior statements to the contrary. This work brings together aspects of developmental psychology and philosophy of mind in interesting and productive ways that make for an inherently interdisciplinary project.