Research Expertise and Interest

cognitive development, learning mechanisms, language development, 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, research focuses on how children acquire knowledge rapidly and accurately with limited amounts of evidence. Their research focuses on how 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, infant cognition (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 they also explore the philosophical implications of rational constructive learning.