People
Principle Investigator
Fei Xu​
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Professor
My research focuses on cognitive and language development, from infancy to early childhood. For the last decade, my collaborators, students, and I have advocated for a new approach to cognitive development, namely rational constructivism. We have argued that human infants begin life with a set of proto-conceptual primitives such as object, number, and agent, and as young learners acquire language, these initial representations are transformed into a format that is compatible with language and propositional thought. We have suggested that three types of learning mechanisms explain both belief revision and genuine conceptual change: (1) Language and symbol learning; (2) Bayesian inductive learning; and (3) Constructive thinking. Lastly, we have argued that infants and children are active learners, and cognitive agency is part and parcel of development. For some representative publications on this view, see Xu (2019, Psychological Review), Fedyk and Xu (2018, Review of Philosophy and Psychology), Luchkina and Xu (2022, Psychological Review), Denison and Xu (2019, Perspectives on Psychological Science), Xu and Kushnir (2013, Current Directions in Psychological Science), and Xu and Kushnir (2012, Rational Constructivism in Cognitive Development – an edited volume).
Anna Cao​​
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Lab Manager
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I graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in Psychology and a minor in Data Science. I am interested in how children acquire knowledge and reason about the world. Currently, I study compositionality, proportional reasoning, and belief revision in children and infants.
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Lab Manager
Gabriella Morales​​
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Project Manager
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Gabriella is the project manager for the Tsimane project, investigating mathematical cognition and probability reasoning in the U.S. and Bolivia. This is a joint project between the Piantadosi Lab and the Xu Lab.
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Project Manager
Patrick Kelly​​
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Project Manager
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Patrick is the project manager for the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) shared facility, and has helped launch several fNIRS projects across the labs of Profs. Silvia Bunge, Keanan Joyner, and Fei Xu (the Illuminating the Brain Consortium). Patrick graduated with Honors from UC Berkeley with B.A.s in Psychology and Anthropology.
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Graduate Students
Stephanie Alderete​​
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Graduate Student
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How do humans process information about the world in order to make informed and rational decisions? I investigate the developmental origins of decision-making by studying how infants and young children make decisions and reason about the world around them. Currently, I am studying children’s ability to do probabilistic and logical reasoning.
Alyson Wong​
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Graduate Student
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I am broadly interested in infants' and children's conceptual development and probabilistic reasoning abilities. I am currently interested in how infants and children use probabilistic information to make decisions and reason about the world around them. I am also interested in the development of compositionality and the role of language in conceptual development.
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Cristina Sarmiento​​
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Graduate Student
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I am broadly interested in how children use language and social interactions to learn about objects and the social world. Before joining the BELL lab, I received a B.A. in psychology from UCLA and was the lab manager for Dr. Elizabeth Spelke's lab for developmental studies at Harvard University.
Collaborators
Elena Luchkina
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Research Scientist
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I am a Research Scientist at Harvard University working with Dr. Elizabeth Spelke. I investigate the origins of human symbolic communication, language-mediated, and abstract cognition. For example, I look into how and when we first establish the link between words and mental representations of something we have never experienced (e.g., a person we have never met, a hypothetical scenario) or a concept that has no stable perceptual form (e.g., probability, if-then relations, etc.). Aside from conducting my empirical work, I am a founder and a co-lead of the Social Contingency Consortium – a multinational collaboration of 120+ scholars investigating the role of contingent interactions in learning.
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Tina Tang​
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Visiting Scholar
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I am a visiting scholar and my research interests lie broadly in developmental psychology, language acquisition, typical and atypical reading development, social-emotional learning, and early childhood education. I also work as the lab manager, if you have any questions or need assistance, feel free to reach out!
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