Waisman Seminar – Dr. Laura Schulz (MIT)

Speaker: Laura Schulz (MIT)

Title: What really matters: Children’s inferences about learning, trying, and caring

Abstract: I have long been interested in children’s ability to make rich, inductive inferences from sparse, noisy data.  Here I look at how these inferential abilities support children’s reasoning about their own and others’ competence and motivation, with implications for everything from children’s task persistence to their moral and pragmatic judgments.  This evidence from my own lab, and many others, suggesting the sophistication of children’s early social cognition is in tension with some claims about children’s early emotion understanding (e.g., that it may be limited to distinctions based on valence and arousal, or focused on a small set of “basic” emotions).  I will suggest instead that very young children make fine-grained distinctions among emotional reactions and map these onto their probable eliciting causes.  I will conclude by discussing our new, open source, online developmental laboratory (Lookit!), which has the potential to expand both the questions we ask, and the populations we reach.

Location: Wiley Conference Center (2nd floor), Waisman Center, Friday March 2, 12:00