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The Opposite of An Experiment in Developmental Science - Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University
Tuesday, March 24, 2026, 02:00pm - 03:20pm
152 Frelinghuysen Rd, Psych Bldg., Busch Campus, Room 105
Abstract: The best future for science on children’s learning will be one that embraces both descriptive research and great experiments. We can all look forward to the new hypotheses that emerge from this union, which will position us to create new models of learning, growth, and change. In my talk, I will focus on entirely natural studies of communication between infants and caregivers, which together show why it’s important to sample at short timescales (milliseconds to minutes) as well as longer ones (days to years). In doing so, I’ll question the divisions we’ve historically built up between topics such as language, emotion, social networks, and the social brain. Complete accounts of learning will need to examine how diverse phenomena like these relate to each other and in fact permeate each other — and I’ll show how descriptive research can quickly shift our assumptions about how children learn. Collectively, I hope we can get closer to seeing children’s learning and communication as they really are: continuous, dynamic, noisy, embodied, and highly variable processes, scaffolded by the very local social world.
Dr. Casey Lew-Williams is Professor and Department Chair in Psychology at Princeton University, with affiliations in Neuroscience, Linguistics, and Princeton’s AI Lab. He directs the Princeton Baby Lab, where his students and postdocs study how young children learn from the dynamics of their communicative environments—using a combination of experimental, descriptive, computational, and social neuroscience approaches. His recent work has been funded by NICHD and Wellcome Leap. Prior to Princeton, he was a faculty member at Northwestern University, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a graduate student at Stanford University. He is a co-founder of ManyBabies (a collaborative group of 750 developmental scientists from around the world) and a chief editor of Frontiers for Young Minds (a science journal for kids).