MIT Early Childhood Cognition Lab lead investigator Laura Schulz studies learning in early childhood. Her research bridges computational models of cognitive development and behavioral studies in order to understand the origins of inquiry and discovery.
Working in play labs, children’s museums, and a recently-launched citizen science website, Schultz is reshaping how we view young children’s perceptions of the world around them. Some of the surprising results of her research: before the age of four, children expect hidden causes when events happen probabilistically, use simple experiments to distinguish causal hypotheses, and trade off learning from instruction and exploration.
““[Infant behavior] studies are also changing the way we think about child development. Laura Schulz, an associate professor of cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes it as an ‘infant revolution’ in science. ”” — The Guardian, December 8, 2013
In this session of TED2015, five speakers explored the bounds of perception — from how babies form expectations to how vision is hardly needed to see. Short recaps of these bold talks … The logic of the young mind. Scientists have to make generalizations on tiny amounts of data – and so do babies. Laura Schulz investigates […]
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