Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Interests
I investigate how learners seek to figure out the world around them by taking actions and considering possibilities. My research examines how children (and adults) learn and reason about causal systems and how learners make decisions during exploration. By integrating cognitive development with ideas from philosophy and computational modeling, I aim to better understand the spontaneous (and sometimes puzzling) behavior of human learners.
Representative Publications
- Lapidow, E., & Walker, C. M. (2022). Rethinking the “gap”: Self-directed learning in cognitive development and scientific reasoning. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 13(2), e1580. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1580
- Lapidow, E., Killeen, I., & Walker, C. M. (2022). Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers. Developmental Science, 25, e13178. doi: 10.1111/desc.13178
- Lapidow, E., Tandon, T., Goddu, M., & Walker, C. M. (2021). A Tale of Three Platforms: Investigating preschoolers’ second-order inferences using in-person, Zoom, and Lookit methodologies. Frontiers in Psychology, 12:731404. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.73404
- Lapidow, E., & Walker, C. M. (2020). Informative experimentation in intuitive science: Children select and learn from their own causal interventions. Cognition, 201, 104315. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104315