PEOPLE

Professor
Director, Berkeley Early Learning Lab
My research focuses on cognitive and language development, from infancy to early childhood. For the last decade, my collaborators, students, and I have advocated for a new approach to cognitive development, namely rational constructivism. We have argued that human infants begin life with a set of proto-conceptual primitives such as object, number, and agent, and as young learners acquire language, these initial representations are transformed into a format that is compatible with language and propositional thought. We have suggested that three types of learning mechanisms explain both belief revision and genuine conceptual change: (1) Language and symbol learning; (2) Bayesian inductive learning; and (3) Constructive thinking. Lastly, we have argued that infants and children are active learners, and cognitive agency is part and parcel of development. For some representative publications on this view, see Xu (2019, Psychological Review), Fedyk and Xu (2018, Review of Philosophy and Psychology), Luchkina and Xu (2022, Psychological Review), Denison and Xu (2019, Perspectives on Psychological Science), Xu and Kushnir (2013, Current Directions in Psychological Science), and Xu and Kushnir (2012, Rational Constructivism in Cognitive Development – an edited volume).

KAITLYN TANG
Lab Manager
Hi, my name is Kaitlyn and I am the lab manager of the Berkeley Early Learning Lab. I am an undergraduate student studying Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. Currently, I am working on a project collaborating with researchers at Cornell and Duke on how children think about the collective greater good.

STEPHANIE ALDERETE
Graduate Student
Hi, my name is Stephanie, and I will be a first-year Ph.D. student in the Xu lab starting fall of 2022. I recently graduated from Harvard College where I studied Psychology with a secondary in Neuroscience. As an undergraduate, I worked as a research assistant and wrote an honors thesis in Professor Susan Carey’s child development lab. I am interested in how the human mind develops and uses concepts of possibility and probability to make decisions and reason about the world.

YUAN MENG
Graduate Student
Hi, this is Yuan from the Berkeley Early Learning Lab. I’m mainly interested in how infants and young children actively gather information about the physical and the social world and make inferences, update beliefs, and form theories on the basis of self-generated evidence.

RONGZHI LIU
Graduate Student
Hi, my name is Rongzhi Liu. I’m interested in how young children learn from the social world and learn about the social world. Particularly, I’m curious about how children reason and infer about other people and social groups. I’m also interested in how children actively gather information from the social world to help them learn.

ELENA LUCHKINA
Research Associate
elena.luchkina@northwestern.edu
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, working in the Infant and Child Development Center. I investigate the development of symbolic communication, with a specific emphasis of word learning. My studies focus on the development of verbal reference, word learning, and language-mediated knowledge acquisition. I use a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures and employs live acting, video recordings, video chat, and online platforms, such as Lookit and Heroiku, in experimental manipulations. As my pastime, I co-host the “It’s innate!” podcast and remotely operate the Parkes radio telescope in Australia as a part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative.
BELL Alumni


EMMA ROTH
Lab Manager under Professor Arianne Eason at the Mind and Society Lab at UC Berkeley.



HARMONIE STROHL
Postbaccalaureate for premed, California State University, Fullerton

SHAUN O'GRADY
Application Developer Senior Analyst, Accenture Operations, San Antonio, Texas.

ZI LIN SIM
Psychologist and Autism Therapist, Autism Resource Centre (Singapore)

AZZURRA RUGGERI
Associate Professor, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria
Max Planck Institute for Human Development Max Planck Research Group Leader
Email: azzurra.ruggeri@gmail.com
Website: https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/azzurra-ruggeri

MINGYI WANG
Associate Professor at Department of Psychology, Beijing Forestry University (China)

STEPHANIE DENISON
Associate Professor, Univeristy of Waterloo (Canada)
Website: https://uwaterloo.ca/psychology/people-profiles/stephanie-denison


VINCENT G. BERTHIAUME
Tech Lead at Audioworks Technologies, Montreal, Canada

KATHRYN DEWAR
Senior Research Manager at Women's Health Research Institute, Vancouver, Canada
Website: http://whri.org/about-us/people/

KRISTA BYERS-HEINLEIN
Associate Professor, Concordia University (Canada)
Website: https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/psychology/faculty.html?fpid=krista-byers-heinlein

MIJKE RHEMTULLA
Associate Professor, Univeristy of California, Davis
Website: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/people/mijke

LILI MA
Associate Professor, Ryerson University (Canada)
Website: https://www.ryerson.ca/psychology/about-us/our-people/faculty/lili-ma/