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).

Fei Xu's Curriculum Vitae

KAITLYN TANG

Lab Manager

babylab@berkeley.edu

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

salderete@berkeley.edu

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

yuan_meng@berkeley.edu

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

rongzhi_liu@berkeley.edu

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.