Alison Gopnik

Biosketch

Alison Gopnik is professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research Group. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University.
She has received the APS Lifetime Achievement Cattell and William James Awards, the SRCD Lifetime Achievement Award, the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, the Bradford Washburn and Carl Sagan Awards for Science Communication, and the Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Foundations of Cognitive Science. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Cognitive Science Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Guggenheim Fellow. She was 2022-23 President of the Association for Psychological Science. She is the author of over 160 journal articles and several books including the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books “The Scientist in the Crib” 1999, “The Philosophical Baby” 2009, and “The Gardener and the Carpenter” 2016. She has written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others. Gopnik has appeared extensively on TV, radio, and podcasts, including The Colbert Report, the Charlie Rose show, Radio Lab, and the Ezra Klein show.

Research Interests

Gopnik was one of the founders of the field of ’theory of mind’, the study of how we come to know the minds of others, a field that has become enormously influential in developmental psychology and in cognitive science and neuroscience more generally.
She also was one of the first to formulate ’the theory theory’, the idea that cognitive development is analogous to theory change in science. This has become one of the leading theoretical accounts of cognitive development. In the past 20 years Gopnik has begun work providing a rigorous computational and mathematical basis for the ‘theory theory’. This analytic work, in turn, has led to a whole new line of empirical research investigating the mechanisms of causal learning in very young children. Gopnik was among the very first psychologists to show that the computational framework of probabilistic models or Bayesian inference could be applied to human psychology. This concept has since become a cutting-edge and highly influential idea in cognitive science. Most recently, Gopnik has been working on two new projects. First, she has been using the computational ideas of probabilistic modeling to work with computer scientists to design Artificial Intelligence systems that can learn in the same way that children do, particularly through exploration and active learning. Second, she began a large empirical and computational project exploring the cognitive science of caregiving as part of a larger project at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences on this important and neglected topic