Faculty member

Research Interests

The overarching goal of the research group Milestones of Early Cognitive Development is to understand how typically human cognition develops in early childhood and how it is implemented in the maturing brain.
As humans, we do not only think about what is the case, but we can also consider what might be the case, what will be the case in the future, or what people believe to be the case. To understand this, we need to hold several different representations of the world in mind and understand which of these refer to the actual world, which merely represent a possibility, someone's belief about the world, or refer to the past or the future. From reasoning about time over considering different possibilities (for example, when we prepare for different possible outcomes in the future) to understanding how other people see the world, many of our daily cognitive processes rely on reasoning about different representations of the world and understanding that these representations need not correspond to the actual world. Being able to think about the world in terms of such abstract representations may be one of the pillars of our uniquely human capacity for abstract reasoning.
Our research aims to understand how reasoning about representations develops in early childhood and how such parallel representations are implemented in the human brain.
We investigate these questions with a combination of behavioral and neuroscientific methods in early childhood and in adults including eye-tracking, EEG, and MRI.

Available PhD projects:

Theory of Mind and Representational Reasoning

• Theory of Mind: Project 1 targets our capacity to understand how our representations of other people's beliefs and perspective on the world are implemented in the brain, in parallel to our own representation of the world, and how this changes in early childhood as children begin to reason about other people's beliefs and unique perspective (referred to as Theory of Mind).
• Reasoning about possibilities: Project 2 targets our capacity to reason about different possibilities, how such parallel versions of the world are represented in the brain, and how this changes as children begin to reason about possibilities in mature ways.
• Potential further projects could target other cognitive domains that may require reasoning about internal representations (e.g., temporal reasoning, episodic memory, etc.), as well as comparative approaches across different cultures to understand how culture contributes to shaping the development of these capacities.

How infant learning may inform AI

• Infants are remarkable learners. They are able to recognize new objects after seeing only a few instances of the object category. This project seeks to understand how infants achieve such generalizations based on very little input by studying their input an object representations with eye-tracking and EEG. In an interdsiciplinary collaborative project with philosophers (Prof. Gyburg Uhlmann) and computer vision researchers (Prof. Eddy Ilg), we aim to use the insights into infant learning for AI.