Professor’s Lecture to Focus on How Infants Process Ideas and Information

What: Andrew N. Meltzoff, the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair in Psychology and Co-Director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, will speak about important advances in cognitive science, and how recent discoveries in developmental psychology have upended the conventional wisdom about infants and young children and the nature of the growing mind. The lecture is open to the public.

When: Wednesday, October 14 at 4:15 p.m.

Where: McCook Auditorium on the Trinity campus, 300 Summit Street, Hartford.

Background: Meltzoff is an internationally renowned expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation have revolutionized the understanding of early cognition, personality, and brain development. According to Meltzoff, some of the most important advances in cognitive science have come from the crib and the nursery.

Psychologists now know that infants are born with the ability to connect to other people. They have an extraordinary capacity to learn from imitation, which has excited much recent interest. Young children are also capable of engaging in joint attention—following the gaze of adults as they spotlight important objects and events. Imitation and joint attention are two important building blocks for social cognition, and they provide an engine for its development.

On a more theoretical level, Meltzoff will suggest that imitation provides a foundation for the later development of ‘theory of mind.’ Infants recognize that other people are ‘like me’ in their actions, and from these roots they develop the idea that others are ‘like me’ in their internal mental states. Meltzoff will discuss new findings in the field of developmental social cognition, as well as building bridges between the allied disciplines of developmental science, social psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and robotics.

A developmental psychologist at the University of Washington, Meltzoff’s main interests include imitative learning, the development of self-other understanding, and children learning from television. He and his collaborators have used neuroscience techniques to explore empathy and social cognition in children and adults.

Meltzoff received his Ph.D. in psychology from Oxford University and his B.A. from Harvard University.  He is the co-author of two books about early learning and the brain: The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind, and Words Thoughts and Theories. He is co-editor of The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases.

Meltzoff is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health. In 2005, he received an award for outstanding research from the Society for Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics and the Kenneth Craik Award in Psychology from Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of many professional societies including: the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

The lecture by Meltzoff, who along with his wife -- Patricia Kuhl, also a psychologist at the University of Washington and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences -- is sponsored by Trinity’s Psychology Department.

For more information about Meltzoff, please visit: http://ilabs.washington.edu/meltzoff
For more information about the Institute for Learning and Brain Science, please visit: http://ilabs.washington.edu

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