Welcome!

leosmileWelcome to the Acquiring Minds Lab website! We study a variety of topics related to the development of social understanding, action understanding, language development, and the interface between those domains. Recent projects have focused on such questions as:

  • How do pedagogical interactions unfold between parent and child?
  • As observers of dynamic human action, how do we identify individual acts within the continuous stream of ongoing motion?
  • How do infants break into organized processing of dynamic human action?
  • How do developments in social understanding expedite language learning?

Two themes stand out in our findings thus far: action processing is surprisingly sophisticated even in infancy, and mechanisms that support the acquisition of skills for action processing seem closely related to those supporting language acquisition. This points to the possibility that general-purpose learning mechanisms are key in the epigenesis of both language and action processing.