Fei Xu: UC Berkeley Department of Psychology, Infant Cognition and Language Lab

The study of cognitive development has often been framed in terms of the nativist/empiricist debate. Here I present a new approach to cognitive development: rational constructivism. I will argue that learners take into account both prior knowledge and biases (learned or unlearned) as well as statistical information in the input; prior knowledge and statistical information are combined in a rational manner (captured by Bayesian probabilistic models); and there exists a set of domain-general learning mechanisms that give rise to domain-specific knowledge. Furthermore, learners actively engage in gathering data from their environment. I will present evidence supporting the idea that early learning is rational, statistical, and inferential, and infants and young children are rational, constructivist learners.