Lucas Butler

The research in my lab focuses on the development and consequences of learning from others in early childhood. Our research explores the interplay between two critical components of early learning: the capacity to learn important information about the world by making inductive inferences on the basis of limited evidence, and the ability to flexibly and selectively learn from others. By investigating this interplay across several important areas of learning—causal reasoning, inductive generalization, categorization, and normative judgment—as well as over the course of development, we hope to generate broad conclusions about how early cognitive development is fundamentally shaped both by the social context in which it occurs, and by children’s developing social cognitive capacities.