A project led by psychology professor Dr. Stephanie Denison received more than $1.7 million CAD in funding from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF).
The research will examine the developmental origins of people’s ability to reason about – and act on – multiple uncertain possibilities.
“Children’s ability to consider multiple possibilities is foundational to intellectual humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness — traits essential for lifelong learning and discovery,” said Denison. “In the long term, this research has the potential to inform educational practices and policies aimed at supporting flexible and open-minded thinking in people, thereby promoting a more inquisitive and adaptable society.”
The team combines expertise from four labs at Waterloo, Harvard, UC San Diego, and the University of Copenhagen. The research will integrate neurological, behavioural, and computational approaches to build a more comprehensive picture of the earliest human capacities for open-minded thinking, including environmental factors and individual traits.
“By using a combination of neurological and behavioural approaches and following children over a 3-year period, we should be able to connect early-emerging implicit understanding (measured via the brain) with later emerging explicit understanding (measured via behavioural experiments),” said Denison. “And we should be able to examine some potentially early-emerging individual differences in how comfortable people are with uncertainty in general and whether some individual children are more or less able to recognize their own uncertainty.”
The focus on curiosity and critical thinking aligns with TWCF’s strategic priority of understanding and promoting human flourishing.
Congratulations to Dr. Denison and the team!