Symposium 2002 Participants

The 32nd Carnegie Symposium on Cognition
June 7-9, 2002 .."Building Object Categories in Developmental Time"

Participants:

Woo-kyoung Ahn

Vanderbilt University

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Woo-kyoung Ahn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Vanderbilt University. Her two main areas of research are categorization and causal
reasoning. Ahn argues that conceptual representations are like scientific theories in that
features of concepts are causally related to each other. In order to fully develop this
so-called theory-based approach to categorization, Ahn has also studied how people
construct causal explanations and identify causes of events. Her recent research
demonstrates that causal relations among features of a concept determine the centrality
of features.
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Lawrence Barsalou

Emory University

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Lawrence Barsalou is Professor of Psychology at Emory University.
Barsalou's research addresses the nature of human knowledge, and its roles in
perception, memory, language, and thought. The theme of his current research is that
sensory-motor mechanisms in the brain ground the human conceptual system.
Other lines of research address the situated character of knowledge, the dynamic online
construction of conceptual representations, the development of ad hoc categories to
support goal achievement, the structure of knowledge, and category learning.
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Melissa Bowerman

Planck Institute of
Psycholinguistic Nijmegen, NL

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Melissa Bowerman is Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the
Free University of Amsterdam. Her research centers on form-meaning mapping in first
language acquisition -- how children come to structure the meanings they associate with
words, inflections, and grammatical patterns in accordance with the semantic categories
of the input language. In recent work she has explored differences in how languages
categorize spatial and other relational meanings, and compared how children learning
different languages arrive at the needed categories. She is co-editor of Language
Acquisition and Conceptual Development (CUP, 2001), which highlights new evidence for
early interactions between nonlinguistic cognitive development and language.
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Dedre Gentner

Northwestern University

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Dedre Gentner’s research is on human learning and thinking. One line of research focuses
on analogy and similarity in learning and reasoning. The other focuses on the influence of
language on cognition. Much of her current research is centered around the interaction
between relational language and relational thought in cognitive development and learning.
She is co-editor of Mental models and The analogical mind and is currently co-editing a
book on language and cognition called Language in mind.
She is Professor of Psychology and Education at Northwestern University and
Director of the Cognitive Science Program.
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Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe

Carnegie Mellon University

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Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests concern the relation between early
achievements in language learning and advances in category development. Her current
work on categorization and naming focuses on how developments in classification arise
out of the processes that make up real-time performance.
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Scott Johnson

Cornell University

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Scott P. Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Cornell University. His primary research theme concerns origins of object perception and
object knowledge in infancy, with a focus on developmental mechanisms. Other work in
his lab investigates early statistical learning, attention, and auditory perception.
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Frank Keil

Yale University

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Frank Keil is Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Yale University,
Master of Morse College at Yale and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Cognitive
Science. His current research focuses on how children and adults construe the world as
being organized into theory like domains even as their explicit knowledge of such theories
is highly skeletal and fragmentary. This focus leads to more specific questions about
illusions of explanatory understanding, the nature of conceptual change, and notions of the
division of cognitive labor.
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Brian MacWhinney

Carnegie Mellon University

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Brian MacWhinney has developed the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System)
Project for the computational study of child language transcript data and the TalkBank
system for the study of conversational interactions. He has developed a model of first and
second language acquisition and processing called the Competition Model. Recently, he
has linked the Competition Model to new understandings about the use of grammar to
express embodied perspective shifting in collaborative conversations.
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Jay McClelland

Carnegie Mellon University

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James L. (Jay) McClelland uses parallel distributed processing models to address issues
of learning, processing and representation. In recent years his work has come to focus
on issues of learning, memory, and cognitive development, and their relation to brain
mechanisms. He is currently completing a book with Timothy T. Rogers on Semantic
Cognition. He is Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and
Co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
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Charles Nelson

University of Minnesota

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Charles A. Nelson is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the
University of Minnesota. His interests concern the developmental relation between brain
and cognition in infants, children and adults. More specifically, Nelson studies the relation
between the medial temporal lobe and memory, and the inferior temporal lobe and
face/object recognition. He uses a combination of approaches to address these issues,
including recordings of the brain's electrical activity (event-related potentials), fMRI, and
behavioral studies.
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Paul Quinn

Washington and Jefferson College

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Paul C. Quinn is Professor of Psychology at Washington & Jefferson College.
His research interests center on the origins and development of human visual cognition,
in particular, how young infants represent information about objects and space.
His work focuses on the topic areas of object perception, object categorization, and
spatial categorization. Current investigations examine the mechanisms by which infants
organize elements to form perceptual wholes, group objects into category representations,
and parse physical space into categories defined by the spatial relations of objects.
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David Rakison

Carnegie Mellon University

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David Rakison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Carnegie Mellon University. His principal research theme is category and concept
development in infancy, with a focus on the mechanisms underlying the emergence of the
animate-inanimate distinction. Current investigations examine infants' attention to
correlations among static and dynamic cues, and the mechanisms by which infants
acquire knowledge about the motion-related properties of different object kinds
(e.g., agency, self-propulsion)
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Tim Rogers

Medical Research Council ~
Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

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Tim Rogers is a research scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in
Cambridge, UK, and an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University. His research is concerned
with semantic knowledge acquisition, the performance of semantic tasks in adulthood
and expertise, and the breakdown of semantic memory in progressive dementias.
His recent work with Jay McClelland has focused on the development of a parallel
distributed processing account of semantic cognition, with an emphasis on understanding
phenomena central to the claim that conceptual knowledge is grounded in implicit causal
domain theories.
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Philippe Schyns

University of Glasgow

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Philippe Schyns is Professor of Psychology at Glasgow University.
His research attempts to bridge the gap currently existing between categorization,
the selective attention to information and the perception of the stimulus. It focuses
on the interactions between knowledge (specifically the functional organization of
categories in memory) and the visual perception of complex stimuli. It addresses the
generic question of "Are categorization and visual processing independent, with
categorization operating late, on an already perceived input, or are they intertwined, with
the act of categorization flexibly changing the perception of the stimulus?"
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Bob Siegler

Carnegie Mellon University

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Robert Siegler is Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon
University. He has been at Carnegie Mellon since receiving his PhD in 1974 from SUNY at
Stony Brook. In the ensuing years, he has written 5 books, edited 3 others, and authored
more than 150 articles and book chapters. The books and articles have focused on
children's reasoning and problem solving, particularly in scientific and mathematical
domains.
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Linda Smith

Indiana University-Bloomington

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Linda Smith is a Chancellor's Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at
Indiana University - Bloomington. Her research is directed to understanding
developmental processes especially at it applies to cognition and word learning.
Her current work seeks to understand how word learning changes processes fundamental
to word learning itself --including attention and object perception. She is co-author with
Esther Thelen of A Dynamical Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition
and Action.
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Kelly Snyder

University of Minnesota

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Kelly Snyder is a doctoral student, working with Charles Nelson, at the
University of Minnesota. She integrates behavioral and high-density electrophysiological
measures (event-related potentials) to study the functional neurobiology of learning and
memory in infants. A specific focus of her research is on developmental differences in
infants' processing of different object categories (including human faces).
Snyder's work is supported by an individual National Research Service Award from NIH.
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Fei Xu

Northeastern University

Fei Xu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Northeastern University. Her research focuses on cognitive and language development,
especially the relationship between the two. Specific topics of her research include the
development of kind concepts and how learning words may play a role in this process,
number representations and how children learn to count verbally, and the use of
statistical information in word learning.
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