Lifespan Development Job Talk - “Infants’ social expectations and social learning”

Abstract: If you’ve ever interacted with a baby, it is not hard to understand why William James suggested their experience of the world was one “great blooming, buzzing confusion.” However, research utilizing infant looking time methods has since shown strikingly sophisticated cognition even in the first months of life. In this talk, I will present data using an inductive generalization method to show that infants think about people as members of social categories—expecting people within a group to be more similar than people from distinct groups. Then, I will highlight how tweaks on the same method can be used to answer a variety of interesting questions about the development of social cognition, from: “How does an infant’s own social experience influence the boundaries they put on social categories?” to “How do infants use others’ emotional expressions to guide their learning?”