PEOPLE

Principle Investigator

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).

Fei Xu's Curriculum Vitae

Anna Cao

Lab Manager

babylab@berkeley.edu

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 and belief revision in infants.

Lab Manager

Graduate Students

Stephanie Alderete

Graduate Student

salderete@berkeley.edu

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

Graduate Student

I am broadly interested in how children understand proportion and probability. I am currently interested in how children use proportional and probabilistic information when making decisions and social evaluations. I am also interested in how we can utilize social framing to improve children's knowledge of more formal math concepts, such as fractions.

Rongzhi Liu

Graduate Student

rongzhi_liu@berkeley.edu

Hi, my name is Rongzhi Liu. I’m interested in how young children learn from the social world and learn about the social world. Particularly, I’m curious about how children reason and infer about other people and social groups. I’m also interested in how children actively gather information from the social world to help them learn.

Cristina Sarmiento

Graduate Student

csarmiento@berkeley.edu

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

Research Scientist

elenaluchkina@fas.harvard.edu

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.

Tina Tang

Visiting Scholar

min_tang@berkeley.edu

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!