Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the Institute of Human Development. She holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University. Her research focuses on cognitive development, causal learning, and the intersection of psychology and philosophy. She leads the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab, part of the UC Berkeley Developmental Labs consortium, exploring how children acquire causal understanding through methods informed by 'theory theory' and Bayesian models.

Her work bridges developmental psychology with AI, examining parallels between children's learning and machine learning. She collaborates with computer scientists to model causal reasoning and has contributed to studies on caregiving dynamics, exploration-exploitation trade-offs, and cross-cultural cognitive development. Gopnik's lab conducts studies with children aged 3-14 years, emphasizing causal relational problem-solving and metaphor comprehension.

Publications highlight topics like intrinsic motivation in human-AI systems, AI's sociocultural implications, and children's superior creative search strategies compared to large language models. She advocates for interdisciplinary approaches, integrating empirical research with computational models to understand foundational cognitive processes.