Elizabeth BonawitzComputational Cognitive Development

About Me

I will be starting a faculty position this fall at Rutgers University, Newark in the Psychology Department. My research bridges two research traditions: Cognitive Development and Computational Modeling. By bridging these methods, I hope to understand the structure of children's early causal beliefs, how evidence and prior beliefs interact to affect children's learning, the developmental processes that influence children's belief revision, and the role of social factors (such as learning from others) in guiding learning.

Selected News:

I am currently accepting graduate students to start Fall 2014. Information about applying to Rutgers - Newark can be found here.

Videos and talks slides for the CDS workshop on Computational Models of Cognitive Development (organized with Tomer Ullman and Josh Tenenbaum) will be available here shortly.

In the News

Scientific American: The educational value of creative disobedience. (July, 2011)

The Economist: Now you know: When should you teach children, and when should you let them explore? (May, 2011)

Slate: Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School (March, 2011)

You can navigate to a more complete list here.

Graduate Work

I received my PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in April of 2009; working in the Lab of Laura Schulz, I studied causal learning and conceptual change in children.

Post Doctoral Research

I am now a post-doc at University of California, Berkeley working with Professor Tom Griffiths in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and collaborating with Professor Alison Gopnik.