Research Bio

Xu Lab's 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 and statistical inference infants and children, infant cognition (e.g., object concept, object kind concepts, number representations, physical and psychological reasoning), language development (word learning, language and concepts) and social cognition (e.g., preferences, intentionality). She and her collaborators have developed a theoretical framework for cognitive development, namely rational constructivism. She and her students also build computational models of cognitive and language development, and explore (1) implications for current machine learning and AI models of cognition, language and learning, and (2) the philosophical implications of rational constructive learning. 

Xu is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Cognitive Science Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP), the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the American Psychological Association (APA). She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Research Expertise and Interest

cognitive development, language development, learning mechanisms, statistical learning and statistical inference, conceptual development, developmental psychology, word learning, physical reasoning, social cognition in infants and children, learning in infants and young children, computational models of cognitive development, Bayesian probabilistic models, cognitive development and AI models, psychology and philosophy