Research Expertise and Interest

cognitive development, language development, learning mechanisms, conceptual development, developmental psychology, social cognition in infants and children, learning in infants and young children, statistical learning and statistical inference, psychology and philosophy, computational models of cognitive development

Research Description

In Fei Xu's lab, our research focuses what conceptual primitives infants start with, and on how infants and young children acquire knowledge rapidly and accurately with limited amounts of evidence. She has done extensive research on probabilistic reasoning in and statistical inference infants and children (e.g., object concept, kind concepts, number representations,  probabilistic reasoning, physical and psychological reasoning), language development (word learning in particular) and social cognition (e.g., preferences, intentionality). They also develop computational models of cognitive and language development, and explore (1) implications for current machine learning and AI models of cognition and language and (2) the philosophical implications of rational constructive learning.