DevSci Colloquium: Casey Lew Williams (Princeton)

Infants Learn From The Messy Dynamics of Their Natural Communicative Environments

Abstract: During natural communication, caregivers pitch information at infants, and infants figure out what to pay attention to across milliseconds and months. In doing so, they make progress in detecting and then running with meaningful, naturally variable structure in their environments. I will present a few recent studies examining how caregivers package language to infants, how infants learn patterns in the complexities of their input, and how infant-adult dyads align their brains and behaviors during natural play. I will also present findings suggesting that such alignment is relevant to children's learning of new information. The data collectively suggest that messy statistics embedded in everyday communication are key to understanding the consequential nature of early learning.

Bio: Casey Lew-Williams is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. He directs the Princeton Baby Lab, where his students and postdocs study how babies learn, with a focus on language and communication. His current work is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Behavior, the McDonnell Foundation, and Wellcome Leap. He is co-founder of ManyBabies and co-chief editor of Frontiers for Young Minds.