Congratulations to Drs. Buchsbaum and Leon-Villagra!

Congratulations to our Principal Investigator Dr. Daphna Buchsbaum and Postdoctoral Research Associate Dr. Pablo Leon-Villagra on receiving a Research Seed Award from Brown University! The funded project is titled “Understanding the dynamics of conceptual development in early childhood” and focuses on two critical domains for conceptual development: (1) How do children’s concepts about biological kinds (e.g., animals) transform to form the complex structures adults can access? (2) Languages differ in how they carve up the perceptual color space. Do the development of adult-like color categories progress similarly across languages?

headshot of Daphna Buchsbaum
Understanding the dynamics of conceptual development in early childhood<br /> Within the first few years of life, children successfully learn complex categories, ranging from the colors in their language to the structure of biological taxonomies. Despite considerable research, there is an ongoing debate about how children develop complex, abstract category representations. Do all children build adult-like categories in the same way? Answering these questions requires methods that can measure children's categorical organization and chart the trajectory of categorical development. Previously, this was not possible, partly because traditional approaches require asking questions difficult for young children to understand and partly because current methods are data-intensive, even for adults. We propose a novel experimental methodology that overcomes these limitations. We focus on two critical domains for conceptual development: (1) How do children's concepts about biological kinds (e.g., animals) transform to form the complex structures adults can access? (2) Languages differ in how they carve up the perceptual color space. We ask if the development of adult-like color categories progresses similarly across languages. Our project offers several exciting prospects. First, our method allows us to relate categories across age groups, expanding our understanding of learning and development. Second, since our method can capture inference tasks from different experiments, our project offers the prospect of producing general computational models of development, advancing Brown's position in fields from machine learning to cognitive (developmental) psychology. In summary, the funding would allow us to conduct crucial experiments on the theoretical foundations of learning and development, providing us with a solid foundation to apply for further external funding.<br /> PI: Daphna Buchsbaum, Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences<br /> Co-PI: Pablo Leon-Villagra, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences