The Project on Children’s Thinking, headed by Dr. Dedre Gentner, studies the development of children’s thought and language. We study how children come to know about the world, with a focus on how their growing insight into linguistic and conceptual structures influences their patterns of learning and reasoning.
One major focus of our research is how children come to learn about spatial relations and how this understanding affects their reasoning. We also study how language can help children think relationally at a younger age than they might otherwise.