Fei Xu Principal Investigator office: 510-642-3344 email: fei_xu@berkeley.edu

Ph.D. 1995
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1995 - 1997
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and MIT

1997 - 2003
Assistant Professor, Northeastern University, Boston, USA

2003 - 2008
Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

2007 - 2008
Visiting Professor, Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley, USA

2008 - 2009
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

2009 - Present
Professor, Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley, USA

Research Interests

My research focuses on cognitive development and language acquisition. Three lines of work are currently on-going in my lab:

1) Rational constructivism, statistical inference, and cognitive development: how infants, children, and adults combine prior knowledge and statistical information in the input in phyiscal reasoning, word learning, social cognition, and other domains of inductive learning.  

2) Object kinds, sortal concepts, and the nature of early words: the process of early word learning and how learning words for object categories guides early conceptual development in domains such as infants' categorization, individuation, and inductive inference;

3) Numerical cognition in infants with Williams Syndrome and in adults using fMRI.

Publications listed by topic

Rational constructivism, statistical inference, and cognitive development

Denison, S., Reed, C. & Xu, F. (in press) The emergence of probabilistic reasoning in very young infants: evidence from 4.5- and 6-month-old infants.  Developmental Psychology. (pdf)

Sim, Z., Yuan, S. & Xu, F. (2011) Acquiring word learning biases. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2544-2549). (pdf)

Yuan, S., Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Xu, F. (2011) Learning individual words and learning about words simultaneously. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp.3280-3285). (pdf)

Xu, F. & Griffiths, T.L. (2011) Probabilistic models of cognitive development: Towards a rational constructivist approach to the study of learning and development.  Cognition. (Introduction to the special issue "Probabilistic models of cognitive development"). (pdf)

Ma, L. & Xu, F. (2011) Young children’s use of statistical sampling evidence to infer the subjectivity of preferences.  Cognition. (pdf)

Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J.B., Griffiths, T., & Xu, F. (2011) A tutorial introduction to Bayesian models of cognitive development. Cognition. (pdf)

Xu, F. (in press) Rational constructivism, statistical inference, and core cognition (BBS commentary on Carey (2009)). Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (pdf)

Dewar, K. & Xu, F. (2010) Induction, overhypothesis, and the origin of abstract knowledge: evidence from 9-month-old infants.  Psychological Science, 21, 1871-1877. (pdf)

Denison, S. & Xu, F. (2010) Twelve- to 14-month-old infants can predict single-event probability with large set sizes. Developmental Science, 13, 798-803. (pdf)

Denison, S. & Xu, F. (2010) Integrating physical constraints in statistical inference by 11-month-old infants. Cognitive Science, 34, 885-908. (pdf)

Kushnir, T., Xu, F. & Wellman, H. (2010) Young children use statistical sampling to infer the preferences of others. Psychological Science, 21, 1134-1140. (pdf)

Kemp, C., Jern, A. & Xu, F. (2009) Object discovery and identification. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 22. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Denison, S. (2009) Statistical inference and sensitivity to sampling in 11-month-old infants. Cognition, 112, 97-104. (pdf)

Xu, F., Dewar, K. & Perfors, A. (2009) Induction, overhypotheses, and the shape bias: Some arguments and evidence for rational constructivism.   In B. M. Hood and L. Santos (Eds.), The origins of object knowledge (pp. 263-284). Oxford University Press. (pdf)

Kemp, C. & Xu, F. (2008) An ideal observer model of infant object perception. Proceedings of the 22 nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. (pdf)

Lucas, C., Griffiths, T., Xu, F. & Fawcett, C. (2008) A rational model of preference learning and choice prediction by children. Proceedings of the 22 nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Garcia, V. (2008) Intuitive statistics by 8-month-old infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105, 5012-5015. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2007) Word learning as Bayesian inference. Psychological Review, 114, 245-272. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2007) Sensitivity to sampling in Bayesian word learning. Developmental Science, 10, 288-297. (pdf)

Xu, F. (2007) Rational statistical inference and cognitive development. In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (eds.), The innate mind: foundations and the future (Vol. 3) (pp. 199-215). Oxford University Press. (pdf)

Denison, S., Konopczynski, K., Garcia, V., & Xu, F. (2006) Probabilistic reasoning in preschoolers: random sampling and base rate. In R. Sun and N. Miyake (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1216-1221). (pdf)

Sortal concepts and early word learning

Xu, F. (2010) Count nouns, sortal concepts, and the nature of early words.   J. Pelletier (ed.), Kinds, things, and stuff: New Directions in Cognitive Science , Vol. 13 (pp. 191-206). Oxford University Press. (pdf)

Dewar, K. & Xu, F. (2009) Do early nouns refer to kinds or distinct shapes? Evidence from 10-month-old infants.   Psychological Science, 20, 252-257. (pdf)

Hall, D.G., Corrigall, K., Rhemtulla, M., Donegan, E. & Xu, F. (2008) Infants' use of lexical-category-to-meaning links in object individuation.   Child Development, 39, 1432-1443. (pdf)

Xu, F. (2007) Sortal concepts, object individuation, and language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 400-406. (pdf)

Dewar, K. & Xu, F. (2007) Do 9-month-old infants expect distinct words to refer to kinds? Developmental Psychology, 43, 1227-1238. (pdf)

Xu, F. (2007) Language acquisition and concept formation: count nouns and object kinds. In G. Gaskell (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Oxford University Press. (pdf)

Xu, F. (2005)  Categories, kinds, and object individuation in infancy.  In L. Gershkoff-Stowe and D. Rakison (eds.), Building object categories in developmental time (pp. 63-89).  Papers from the 32nd Carnegie Symposium on Cognition.  New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. (pdf)

Xu, F., Cote, M. & Baker, A. (2005) Labeling guides object individuation in 12-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 16, 372-377. (pdf)

Xu, F. (2002)  The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy.  Cognition, 85, 223-250. (pdf)

Object individuation and sortal concepts

Xu, F. (in press) Categorization, object individuation, and object manipulation.  Cognitive Development. (pdf)

Xu, F. (2007) Sortal concepts, object individuation, and language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 400-406. (pdf)

Rhemtulla, M. & Xu, F. (2007) Sortal concepts and causal continuity: Comment on Rips, Blok, and Newman (2006). Psychological Review, 114, 1087-1094. (pdf)

Rhemtulla, M. & Xu, F. (2007) Postscript: sortal concepts are fundamental for tracing identity. Psychological Review, 114, 1095. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Baker, A. (2005) Object individuation in 10-month-old infants using a simplified manual search method.  Journal of Cognition and Development, 6, 307-323.  (pdf)

Xu, F., Carey, S. & Quint, N. (2004)  The emergence of kind-based object individuation in infancy.  Cognitive Psychology, 49, 155-190.  (pdf)

Xu, F. (2003) The development of object individuation in infancy.  In H. Hayne & J. Fagen (eds.), Progress in Infancy Research, Vol. 3 (pp. 159-192).  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (pdf)

Carey, S. & Xu, F. (2001) Infants' knowledge of objects: Beyond object files and object tracking.   Cognition , 80 , 179-213.  (pdf)

Xu, F. & Carey, S. (2000) The emergence of kind concepts: a rejoinder to Needham and Baillargeon (2000). Cognition, 74, 285-301. (pdf)

Xu, F. (1999)  Object individuation and object identity in infancy: The role of spatiotemporal information, object property information, and language.  Acta Psychologica, 102, 113-136. (pdf)

Xu, F., Carey, S., & Welch, J. (1999)  Infants' ability to use object kind information for object individuation.  Cognition,  70, 137-166. (pdf)

Leslie, A., Xu, F., Tremoulet, P. & Scholl, B. (1998)  Indexing and the object concept: "what" and "where" in infancy.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 10-18. (pdf)

Xu, F. (1997)  From Lot's wife to a pillar of salt: Evidence for physical object  as a sortal concept.  Mind and Language, 12, 365-392. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Carey, S. (1996)  Infants' metaphysics: the case of numerical identity.  Cognitive Psychology, 30, 111-153. (pdf)

Number representations in infants and adults

Van Hewegen, J., Ansari, D., Xu, F. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2008) Small and large number processing in infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome. Developmental Science, 11, 637-643.

Ansari, D., Lyons, I., van Eimeren, L., & Xu, F. (2007) The role of the temporo-parietal junction in small and large number processing: an fMRI study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1845-1853. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Arriaga, R. I. (2007) Number discrimination in 10-month-old infants. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 25, 103-108. (pdf)

Xu, F., Spelke, E.S., & Goddard, S. (2005) Number sense in human infants. Developmental Science, 8, 88-101. (pdf)

Xu, F. (2003)  Numerosity discrimination in infants: Evidence for two systems of representations.   Cognition, 89, B15-B25. (pdf)

Xu, F. & Spelke, E. S. (2000)  Large number discrimination in 6-month-old infants. Cognition, 74, B1-B11. (pdf)

 
Other publications