Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik is one of my favorite writers. Her research explores how young children come to know about the world around them. The work is informed by the “theory theory”–the idea that children develop and change intuitive theories of the world in much the way that scientists do! I love that hypothesis. She also studied how young children learn across different knowledge domains, including physical, biological and psychological. In collaboration with computer scientists, she used the Bayes Net formalism to help explain how children are able to learn causal structure from patterns of data, and her team has demonstrated that young children have much more powerful causal learning mechanisms than was previously supposed.
John Medina
John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist who studied the isolation and characterization of genes involved in human brain development and the genetics of psychiatric disorders. He is the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University and he is a columnist for the Psychiatric Times.
Daniel J. Siegel is someone whose work I have read extensively. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. He developed the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology (still nascent), which is “an interdisciplinary view of life experience that draws on over a dozen branches of science to create a framework for understanding of our subjective and interpersonal lives.”
Tina Payne Bryson
Dana L. Suskind
Dana L. Suskind is a Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center and founder and co-director of its Center for Early Learning & Public Health. She specializes in early childhood development with an emphasis on brain development for children aged birth to three, particularly those born into poverty.
