Sue Hespos, PhD
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2024 Summit
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Infant Cognition: What Babies Know
Affiliation
Western Sydney University
Links
Bio:
Developmental psychologist Professor Hespos is on a mission to show that babies think before they speak. She runs BabyLab, the foremost infant research laboratory in Australia that conducts research with infants and children focusing on language acquisition, cognitive development and learning.
Historically, it was thought that infants are born with a relatively blank slate and knowledge is constructed through interactions between the infant and the environment. In this approach, the task for the young infant is to construct reality by gaining experience. But Professor Hespos champions a different position in her work, called core knowledge. The key tenet of this approach is that underneath all the things that vary across humans, there exists a set of perceptual and conceptual capacities that are common.
Professor Hespos’ research focuses on early conceptual abilities, and how early thinking lays the foundation for adult reasoning. She uses a variety of methods to ask pre-verbal infant questions and investigate what infants understand about their world and the first links between words and concepts. This information sheds light on the basic principles that guide cognition and learning, not only in infants, but throughout the lifespan. Her research aims to specify the nature of thinking in young infants to advance understanding of two things: how language may capitalize on pre-existing cognitive abilities, and how these abilities relate to the cognitive abilities of other species.
